tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70180552024-03-23T11:20:41.469-07:00He who lives in the moment lives eternallyPoets and writers drink more intensely. Smoke more intensely. Worship God more intensely. Poets and writers fuck more intensely. Poets and writers give more willingly-- spilling the alphabetical marrow of their souls out into the albino sonogram of hope that is the page, hoping some stranger whom he or she has never before met turns to his crafted syllables in time of dire need and somehow finds solace, finds laughter finds a friend. David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.comBlogger300125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-83017246219600922752014-12-16T11:50:00.001-08:002014-12-16T11:50:45.490-08:00Dr. Joanne “Grandma Glasser” Alumni Enema<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOTXrQz-mQS9lQ8q97KyA03N_lkNxC61Vy-_eBTTBdOuDFEgU0je1_Ckn75pVx4paFr0_E1Q4llVDW7TJLWgWWhqaglqvBb5TLlvC3hDCUFBsdSFyhi_m1t3AmxpBWmG_vixbtLg/s1600/glassass.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhOTXrQz-mQS9lQ8q97KyA03N_lkNxC61Vy-_eBTTBdOuDFEgU0je1_Ckn75pVx4paFr0_E1Q4llVDW7TJLWgWWhqaglqvBb5TLlvC3hDCUFBsdSFyhi_m1t3AmxpBWmG_vixbtLg/s1600/glassass.png" height="562" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">T</span>ired of Feeling bloated or financially constipated
while perusing your Monthly student loan statements?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sick of using foisted scraps of Hilltopics
for toilet paper? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Embarrassed to display
that Jim Les Bobble head doll you received as an award imitating KABOOM! during
Honors Hog Roast at the annual Cullom-Davis Library’s DEWEY DECIMAL DAYS?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Sigh no more fellow alumnus. Relief has arrived.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Dr. Joanne Grandma Glasser’s Alumni Enema will leave
you feeling plutocratic, haplessly hoity-toity, diuretically delusional and (sappy
pun pending) stinking rich.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Grandma Glasser’s Alumni Enema releases the hourly
strain of thoroughly educated lower middle class financial burdens into a
placid stool of political naiveté, as calm and <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>idyllic as the multi-million dollar alumnus
center whose name it bears… or of the million dollar make-over highest-paid-University-presidential
countenance that is Grandma Glasser herself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Whether you are an Associate professor scraping by on
four thousand a semester teaching FROSH composition or have been laid off at
BU, having your hours guillotined thanks to low enrollment and an overpriced
utilitarian architectural boob job your tuition unwillingly fostered, one sweet
Southern hemispherical shot of Grandma Glasser’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Alumni Enema will put your creative colon at
ease and you will find yourself kowtowing with high-brow River City literati, sipping
boxed Franzia at the happening Richard Pryor wing at the unabashedly successful
River Front Museum, admiring the athletic prowess of the still undefeated politically
correct Bradley Braves before shunning the chicanery of Free speech as
lampooned in farcical city hall tweets while admiring the grandiose Euclidean
symmetry<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that is the newly refurbished
intersection of Main and University.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Yes with Grandma Glasser Alumni Enema there is simply
no shit on the Hilltop.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">“I used to get so backed up wondering if I would still
have a job teaching at BU especially after all the cut backs,” Says BU Alum and
associate prof of comp Dr. Ben Zover. “Now I don’t mind that I send my kid to
District 150, am so overdue on my student loans that I have irreparably marred
my credit score and that I won’t have presents for Christmas this year. With
Dr. Grandma Glasser Alumni Enema I literally feel like there was an unwarranted
six figure income coming out of my ass at all times.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Dr. Zover even stated that, like Glasser, who had
absolutely no ties to the University before she in 2007, “ After I shot my
first Grandma Glasser up the ol’ literary appendix I suddenly found myself a
member of various boards in town doing absolutely nothing and then the money
starting <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ker-ching, ker-chinging</i>, if
you know what I mean.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Zover then relayed a droll anecdote about the time
first time Grandma Glasser arrived to a board meeting at Cat lugging a bag of
Purina. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">“After a good ol’ fashion Grandma Glasser enema I was ‘tootin-like-ah-putin.’”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Seventh year Philosophy major Anita Trollop said that
she was initially “ kinda dubious” to take a Grandma Glasser Alumni Enema since
the only people she knows who take enemas are, “Like my own grandma and late
Dr. Gorev.” She said that she found the experience, “existentially kinky in a
good way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">“My philosophical innards were ontologically corroded
with anxiety, not knowing where I would find a job or how much time I can stall
before the Grim Reaper ferrying the Scythe of student Loans arrives. My life
kinda resembled the Quad last week when student’s protested by lying down in a
jumble corrugated mass. Now when I look at the quad I see a modern day
acropolis I<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>built with student funds
It’s beautiful in a way. I feel like a Cleopatra looking at her pyramids while
petting an asp.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Trollop stated that she named her asp ‘Boobles.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Trollop also stated that, since taking Grandma’s
Glasser’s Alumni Enema<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>she has become
sociologically inured to the click of expired bullets echoing 400 meters away
from the Southern Valley and that she plans on giving herself a much deserved
raise sometime before the next U.S. NEWS and WORLD Report. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">So next time you<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>feel<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>overtly privileged, out of
touch with reality and full of shit, fraught with remorse over your academic
proclivities do<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>consider imbibing
Grandma Glasser’s Alumni Enema— <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">‘”THE LAX of the HIGHER TAX BRACK”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-DM2iDVQe6lcTCatfzQ6I82EfyrtqM3ELea33AHrWE26DDIJ2uagR5yFOG-vWjZWVegT9t5g28ULZU6u7BpfHPkruuxX-rtLpF_tOjZsPelmr1ptFFPy1_J0qfHXTiNvnXTGLFw/s1600/lydia.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-DM2iDVQe6lcTCatfzQ6I82EfyrtqM3ELea33AHrWE26DDIJ2uagR5yFOG-vWjZWVegT9t5g28ULZU6u7BpfHPkruuxX-rtLpF_tOjZsPelmr1ptFFPy1_J0qfHXTiNvnXTGLFw/s1600/lydia.png" height="161" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Order now and receive gratis a year’s supply of
Grandma Glasser’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Deep Pocket alumni
Lydia Moss Lip Gloss. No matter how deep your contributory pockets may extend,
there’s always room in your pants for Lydia Moss Lip Gloss, the lip gloss for
deep pockets assisting in the nepotistic art of anal osculation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">*Side effects may include local kickbacks, subterfuge,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the spontaneous appearance of overnight
apiary hairdos, rectal puckering, and an ersatz, albeit annoying Tennessee
twang slightly reminiscent of the Pig Squeal from Deliverance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-8759164128124388792014-08-28T13:43:00.001-07:002014-08-28T14:27:14.110-07:00Two Amber bocks, a shot of brandy and a cheap cigar: Remembering the late great John Armstrong<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH3d9ovnAiDVKLZWwVFmF-wBBaYAGEdWYMBkb9_htZ4ENFz3myRw2nVkOfi3AqsQb5B1yTQu34B2Iag_LEjmBGAa6ozvv3G_n3UYarSpOWdXsayTRU_gWcNOGhXNMsYCc4v_lPZw/s1600/whiskey_and_cigar_painting__hennessy_whiskey_paint_1565aa6151500915ccb506df156f4481.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH3d9ovnAiDVKLZWwVFmF-wBBaYAGEdWYMBkb9_htZ4ENFz3myRw2nVkOfi3AqsQb5B1yTQu34B2Iag_LEjmBGAa6ozvv3G_n3UYarSpOWdXsayTRU_gWcNOGhXNMsYCc4v_lPZw/s1600/whiskey_and_cigar_painting__hennessy_whiskey_paint_1565aa6151500915ccb506df156f4481.jpg" /></a></div>
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He would arrive like atomic clockwork at Champs West at 11:02 pm, on the dot, every Tues and Thurs when either Monica from Germany or cool Gavra Lynn was tending the helm of the bar driving all the way from the rural backcountry hills of Washington, arriving almost always wearing this cool variation of a Stetson hat and an overcoat, sometimes traipsing in with a cane. He would order a Michelob Amber Bock and sit at the edge of the bar. He would take his hat off in a dignified manner as if showing deference to something lost and fire up a cheap cigar, even though this was well after the indoor smoking ban, even though the bar could get a $200 fine, he was allowed to smoke his cigar inside the dank clover of Champs West since no one was going to give a ticket to an 85 year old gentlemen, a lifelong scholar, a hapless hippophile (which means someone who loves horses, like an anglophile is someone who loves England), a navy veteran of World War Two who signaled the end of the war from his nautical vessel. He would quote poems from memory and once, as a fledgling journalist, interviewed Carl Sandburg. He worked for the Journal Star for almost half a century and was the morning editor of the paper I used to wake up at 4:30 am every morning to rubber band and deliver in the same West Peoria neighborhood where later the we would meet and drink beer. He was avuncular and kind and had bushy eyebrows the gentlest hands I have ever seen. He was a father and grandfather and great-great grandfather and a devout husband for over sixty-five years. He was a man of integrity and a man of faith. He was journalist and a kindred soul and who, every Tues. and Thurs. at exactly 11:02pm I anticipated with gnawing appetite and insatiable vigor sitting next to this raconteur, this man of letters, just to toss back a couple of beers and hear his stories of journalist of old.<br />
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His name was John Armstrong.<br />
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He was my friend.<br />
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I first met John Armstrong after one of our poetry reading series in late 2009. Like any neighborhood alcoholic geyser <a href="http://peoriabarblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/champs-west.html" target="_blank">Champs West</a> offered a Steinbeckian array of characters to compliment the beer selection. Seldom a Tues night passed when Good Bad and Bad Brad (the cultural yin and yang of the West Peoria bar scene) weren't in attendance or Duffy wasn't pressing his finger into the glazed forehead of the corner video-game machine. There was Roger who always drank Busch Light and there was Joanne (whom I lovingly admonished when she groused about John's cigar) and cool Brett who slices meat at Haddad's and Frank who plays a mean acoustic who fixes bikes. Champs West was for a long time the aesthetic hub for local poet's and aesthetic hipsters to hang out, swig PBR, perform and pontificate esp. during the phrenetic glory days of the poetry series. After one reading I noticed an elderly man seated by himself near the front edge of the bar. He was drinking a Michelob Amber Bock, pouring the libation from the bottle into a glass while taking sporadic puffs from a cigar. I immediately told the bar tender to give him a chip (ah, the beer chip days!) went over and thanked him for coming, not realizing that he was a fixture at Pam and Charlie's establishment, not realizing that he was a man of letters and that he had worked as a writer and editor for almost 50 years.</div>
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He thanked me for the beer chip. Seeing that he was smoking a cheap Dutch Master cigar I fired up an ersatz off-brand Swischer sweet I had in my jacket and sat down beside him. He commented that he greatly enjoyed hearing young people tell stories and recite poems. He took a drag from his cigar and began to quote Thomas Moore. I clapped and insisted on buying him another beer chip. I asked him if he in academia, a retired prof. emeritus former chair of a liberal arts college, perhaps. He took another drag and said no, that he was retired Newspaper man, that he has worked as a writer and was a former editor at the Journal Star. </div>
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We shook hands and a friendship was welded, forged by domestic beer, plumes of tobacco smoke and late-night anecdotes John would generously avail in story after story about his half-century in journalism. </div>
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John was cut from a slab of old-school journalistic granite, a time when the newsroom at the Journal Star was a clattering nest of typewriters, thick tufts of cigarette smoke erupting from reporters' desks like volcanic steam over a hot-blooded Vesuvius of incumbent headlines. A time when stories were slapped together in a staccato of brisk typebars wielding hierglphics of ink into the curl of the page, the feisty crunch of fingers pelting out editorials to the intermittent ping of a saluting platen. The newsroom was a industrial cog, culling wire-tapped global datum into freshly minted paragrahs and editorial columns printed en masse and circulated in a manner of hours. I was hungry for stories from this era. I wanted to hear about the hard drinking chain smoking journalists of yesterday. I wanted to know how technological advancements of the late 20th century totally revolutionized the newspaper business. John's tales of the newsroom never failed. He would describe the sometimes tornadic commotion newsroom. The deadlines. The women hired to be 'readers' who would edit a piece line-by-line several times seeking typos before the piece was re-edited and typesetting itself was a tedious and manual labor, before feeding the daily news into the unforgiving jaws of the press, where an typesetting error could yield irreparable results in both journalistic rectitude and sales.<br />
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I wanted to know more.<br />
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I wanted to know what it felt like to be on the cusp of global information in an era predating the ubiquity of 24-7 CNN or God forbid the internet. I wanted to know what it felt like to toil and itch at the bite of a lead; to bangout a story within dripping tics of an apocalyptic deadline. I wanted to feel the newsroom agog in a cumulus if tobacco smoke as the presses halted with the news of Kennedy's assassination, Reagan being shot, the incendiary ballet of the Challenger disintegrating in overhead flares or one world leader telling another world leader to tear down this wall.<br />
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I wanted to know what the newsroom felt like the day man's space boot incised tracks on the nearest lunar orb and how the future was, so to speak, here.<br />
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But more than anything else there was one writer I wanted to know about. A writer who had been the voice of the working-class asperity of Peoria, Il in down and out Reganomics '80s. A writer who had passed away when I was in fourth grade and who I discovered on my own by sifting through the shelves of the Cullom-Davis Library and coming across a book with the author sharing a forty oz of malt liquor with homeless man wearing a disheveled State Farm cap. The author who was the Raymond Carver of Peoria and championed working class blue-collar ethos in a manner no writer has captured since.<br />
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John had been the editor of the late-great <a href="http://www.eastpeoriatimescourier.com/article/20140218/Opinion/140219105" target="_blank">Rick Baker</a>. <br />
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The 2009 Kentucky Derby was won by Mine That Bird, the horse nobody believed in. The horse was a gelding which in horse terms means that the horse has lost his hung-like-a horsehood ornament so to speak. He entered the Kentucky Derby at 50-1. From the outset of the race the horse foundered and was eight-lengths back. By the time the horses plunged down the backstretch Mine That Bird had fallen so far behind the cataclysmic hoofs of the thundering pack that even the play-by-play announcer failed to see him. Somehow jockey Calvin Borel, skimming the rail, was able to pick up one horse at a time and during the turn final turn exploded into the lead, winning by six lengths, dwarfing his competitors, making the little horse, the long shot of 50-1 the second greatest upset in the 135 year history of the race.<br />
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I wanted to know everything about Rick Baker. What sort of beer he drank. What the first drafts of his stories looked like. What bars did he frequent? What he was like as a person. Was he as much of a bad-ass in real life as he was in his writing? After I first discerned the work of Rick Baker I went on a quest to collect all his books (prized copy is an autograph copy of the Rest of Baker's Best) and started buying them in bulk and started giving them to everyone I know. The two STAR journalists (known in the community) ripped him apart when I imparted my new found zeal. They called him an ass hole and a selfish prick and it hurt because no one likes to hear that your mentor was a prick esp. one whose work, thirty years later, remains as fresh as the ink it was typeset on.<br />
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More than anything else I wanted to know where Rick Baker was buried. For me, going to his grave and paying my respect and saying thank you was the equivalent of going to Jim Morrison's grave in Pere Lachaise. <br />
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John Armstrong knew Rick well. He smiled when I said his name. He said he used to meet Rick for drinks at the HofBrau. He remembered that Rick died during Lent and spoke about the veil of looming sadness draped across the newsroom following his untimely demise. He wasn't able to tell me where (or if) Rick was buried but he seemed please that 'Young people' were reading the work of writers' who had encapsulated the pulse of this town. <br />
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Writers' he had edited into both publication and circulation.<br />
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Local writers who, under his aegis, had stood the test of time.<br />
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John's ritual was, every Tues and Thurs. night, around 10:20 he would care for his wife of 65 years, tuck her in the couch with a blanket. He would then head out from Washington to Champs West arriving almost always at 11:02pm. He was friends with owners Pam and Charlie and had been embarking in his Tues.?Thurs ritual for at this dank West Peoria <br />
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He would order two Amber Bocks (sometimes a whiskey). He would always end the night with a toast of E &J brandy. He would smoke cigars. He was generous in his tips. He was friendly. For the wealth of stories he contained he seemed more intent on listening to a random patron who would sit next to him, John almost always initiating the conversation by buying a beer chip and offering a benevolent grin.<br />
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I would continue to see him very week. The long haired hippie and the octogenarian drinking beer, smoking cigars, ashing in a coffee cup and chatting incessantly about writers of old.<br />
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But we shared another love. A love for the sport of Kings.<br />
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A year after I met John I was doing research for a Rick Baker project I had been working on ( I really want to erect a Rick Baker statue outside the public library downtown with the words GIVE 'EM HELL, RICK at the cement stump). I was in Rick's hometown of Leroy, Il and I was looking for places he had alluded to in his writing. I wanted to find the remnants of Baker. I wanted to find the pool hall above where he was purportedly born. I ended up in the cemetery outside of town, with my friend Valena, just walking around thinking that maybe I would saunter into a tombstone with the surname Baker etched in GOTHIC font. Any disciple of work of Rick Baker will remember Baker's escapade to painstakingly discern the identity of Mary Doefour in Mary, Me. I wanted to find where my hero was laid to rest. I wanted to say a prayer at his tombstone and drink a beer in his memory. <br />
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I wanted to say thank you.<br />
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As I was ambling around the cemetery I encountered two elderly ladies with blue hair and dated perms out power walking. I told them I was looking for the final resting place of the late-great Rick Baker who was originally born in Leroy. They knew the name but didn't think he was buried in the cemetery. One of the blue-permed ladies said that her husband was the caretaker of the cemetery. She phoned him up on her cell phone and within less than five minutes he arrived.<br />
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"I know his folks are buried here but I don't think he is," The caretaker, a beefy cheek man assessed, claiming that he seemed like the sort of writer who would have his ashes cremated and shot out of a cannon from a boat on the Peoria river.<br />
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The beefy-cheek caretaker talked about his father and his mother. Rick's crazy first wife and his children which he described as, "one good, one not so good."<br />
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"If he was buried anywhere in the cemetery he'd be around here," The caretaker said, pointing to an overgrown area in the far west side near where Baker's father was buried. As he walked over the beefy-cheek caretaker kneeled down as if proposing marriage to a wraith. He pulled some weeds and prairie grass from a taupe colored slab. He then stood up with a smile on his face.<br />
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"He's here!!!"<br />
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<br />
Valena and I both kneeled pulling scraps of grass off the site. It was hard to tell if it was an actual grave or just a marker in the family lot. The lettering had faded but you could make out the name Richard W. Baker.<br />
<br />
In the center of the marker was an unfurling sheath of parchment and a dancing quill.<br />
<br />
Baker was a writer until the day he died.<br />
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
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John was a <a href="http://succulentsobriety.blogspot.com/2013/05/day-12-succulent-southern-comfort.html" target="_blank">huge horse racing aficionado</a>. It was the only sport he really followed. John had told me that when he was a kid his prized possession was kind of stamp-book that contained every winner of the Kentucky Derby and every year his eldest daughter would host a derby party and serve mint Juleps. John himself had been to the derby several times and would talk about thoroughbreds from the 50's and 60's as we smoked our cigars and discussed the elusiveness of the triple-crown and how, even after 150 years in an age of records being doped- and shattered in other sports, the times at the Derby and Preakness have remained remarkably consistent. For Christmas one year I found an old article in Sports Illustrated anthology of William Faulkner covering the Kentucky Derby and I gave it to John as a gift.<br />
<br />
He smiled. <br />
<br />
We would continue to talk about horses and literature and old time Peoria, "Peoria really started going down hill when Jumer's closed. I mean, that's what you did when someone came into town--you took them to Jumer's!!!" I relished our conversations. John would always stay until last call. If it was icy I would escort him out to his car. I have never (to this day) met anyone over 70 with the mental perspicacity of John Armstrong. He had endured heart surgery in the early 90's (which he claimed afterwards, had coerced him into retiring his pipe) but he had everything upstairs. He was how I wanted to be when the inevitable vagaries of time ruffle the countenance of youth: kind, giving, well-read, and cigar friendly.<br />
<br />
About two years into our friendship I got one of the biggest breaks in my literary career. I was flown by PEN to perform with writers I admire in a bar in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-0ZlVkRi0M" target="_blank">Hollywood for Dirty Laundry Lit.</a> The poems I had been performing at Champs West and ART SHOW and SPEAKEASY and other Midwestern venues would now be performed in front of LA's literati. After years of rejection from the Big Boy periodicals I had finally made a dent in the literary world. When I told my mom she offered a loving "Well, Dave" (mom is not really a fan of my work). When I told fellow writers whom I thought were friends I was exiled from poetry events I helped sculpt and treated with bitterness.<br />
<br />
When I told John Armstrong that, after years of rejection I finally got a break he grabbed the side of my arm. He didn't just smile. He told me congratulations.<br />
<br />
"You did it Dave." Is what he said.<br />
<br />
He beamed.<br />
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<br />
I came back to the cemetery in Leroy, Illinois a month later, with Valena. I had a 24oz of BUSCH. It was dusk and it was autumn and I found Rick Baker's grave. Valena and myself ripped thatches of earth that had grown over the marker. I bowed my head, chanted a metaphysical Persian mantra before alighting the 24 oz. of BUSCH. I chugged half of it in one gulp and then placed the remainder of the libation on Uncle Rick's grave.<br />
<br />
I had shared a beer with the great Rick Baker.<br />
<br />
I then did what I came into the cemetery to do.<br />
<br />
I looked at his name on the stone and told him thank you.<br />
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<br />
This is how I heard of the death of the great John Armstrong: I work third shifts and don't sleep but twice a month I have 16 hour sleep binge during which I usually harbor crazy dreams. Last Saturday afternoon, in the thoroughly air-conditioned drone between shifts, I had an eight part dream. The third part of the dream found me racing through the labyrinth of West Peoria on a bike that was not mine. I stopped and I said goodbye to old lovers. I was chased by (seemingly hot) female FBI agents who pulled me over only to wish me good luck. Before I left I stopped at this dapper gay-couples house. As I went in they told me they had two gifts for me. The classy gay man used a giant arm-a-tron and fished behind the couch and handed me a leather briefcase. He then told me my second gift was upstairs.<br />
<br />
As I went upstairs I saw John Armstrong. He was in a library. He was smiling. He then handed me two books. The first was Joseph Campbell's WINGS OF ART. The second was David Foster Wallace's INFINITE JEST. He then pointed at the cover.<br />
<br />
"I put a new cover on the book just for you." He said, in the dream, with a smile that somehow gleamed.<br />
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
When Pam and Charlie sold Champs West in June 2013 I lost track of John. My work hours shifted. I went through periods when I was endeavoring to experience sobriety and write about not drinking. The Champs crowd modulated to the Tartan Inn, which is less than two blocks from where I live. John went to he Tartan periodically but he was looking for some place that was cigar friendly to frequent on his Tues. and Thurs. nights jaunts in the beer garden at Jimmy's on Farmington rd. <br />
<br />
I wanted to do something nice for John as a Christmas gift. John had told me before that he didn't have a DVD player or e-mail or internet access (he was just from a different generation) so I downloaded as many Kentucky Derby's as I could find off of youtube. I had not seen John in about six months. I was going to set back and smoke cigars with my mentor while watching old Kentucky Derby. I wanted to do something to make John smile.<br />
<br />
When I go to to Jimmy's at 11:15 the bar was packed. It was Bradley's mid-semester senior walk and the walk was winding down. The emerald green trolley that is Jimmy's pub was flooded with drunk college students throwing up and making out. I skirted through the bar with laptop in tow. I went to the beer garden. I figured that there would be too many people and John would have refrain from staying. I asked the bar tender over the co-ed fracas and he claimed he had not seen John. <br />
<br />
I idled for a few minutes with hopes that he might drive past and we could adjourn to the Tartan where I could show him the videos of the sport he loved.<br />
<br />
Sadly he never arrived.<br />
<br />
I would never see my friend again.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
The next day I told the series of eight dreams to my friend Valena during her lunch break. Her boss used to be co-owner of the Tartan Inn and he asked, since I was walking home, if I could drop some mail off for the current owner. As I walked inside the bar I saw <a href="http://succulentsobriety.blogspot.com/2013/05/day-15-dream-dalliance-and-gift-of.html" target="_blank">Gavra Lynn</a>. After the dissolution of Champs West she had started tending bar at the Tartan Inn, bringing a great deal of the clientele with her. She gave me a hug and asked me how life was going. She then asked me if I heard about John Armstrong.<br />
<br />
I knew exactly what she would say next.<br />
<br />
I said the word no three times in a row like a round.<br />
<br />
I had dreamed about my friend only the night before.<br />
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
<br />
Writing is a lonely vocation. It is competitive as fuck. At times it is solipsistic, self-indulgent. Make a career out of it and you will, in the immortal words of novelist Richard Powers, "Baffle your friends and family and change the lives of total strangers." Every year, without fail, I hear of someone who is in my profession of poems/literature who commits suicide. Every year, w.out fail, I receive an unbidden missive from an arid academician informing me how disgusting and sick my work is.<br />
<br />
Write long enough and you'll make a lot of enemies. Keep on writing and you'll find people in your craft who understand you. Keep on writing after that, keep on pummel out sentences when no one else believes in you and you will sit down at the edge of the neighborhood bar one night and find a mentor, you will find someone who memorized poems in the their late teens and have carried it with them every day of their life . Someone who is well read yet not stuffy. Someone who smiles and who listens and encourages. Someone who has lived such as fascinating and full existence that you just can't help but beckon him for stories.<br />
<br />
Keep on doing what you feel compelled to do with the extremely finite and limited breath you have, by some cosmic bacterial evolutionary happenstance been granted to participate in this vaporous smudge of existence deemed reality and you will meet people who embody everything you deem to one day become. John Armstrong not only embodied what it was like to grow old with grace and dignity and live a full life in the literary arts, he embodied what it was to become a man. As a husband he loved and cared for his wife and was married over 65 years. He fathered nine children and(!!!!) close to 100 grand, great-grand and great-great grand children. He kept his faith his entire life. He never stopped learning. He never stopped quoting poems. Never stopped acknowledging the atavistic importance of beer with his brothers.<br />
<br />
He never stopped giving.<br />
<br />
****<br />
<br />
<br />
It won't happen until sometime this autumn but it will happen. Probably in October. I will sneak into Springdale Cemetery near dusk scraping across ruby and cranberry colored leaves. I'll find the thatch of dirt where the earthly remnants of my cigar-chomping mentor is interred. I'll avail a six-pack of Michelob Amber Bock, I'll smoke a cheap Dutch Master cigar. I'll then leave a beer on his grave and tell him thank you.<br />
<br />
Then I will go home and watch every Kentucky Derby I downloaded to share with him. I will probably drink a lot of beer and continue to chain-smoke cheap cigars and, at exactly 11:02 go out on my balcony and yell out at harvest moon as loud as I possibly can.<br />
<br />
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<br />
<br />
I then will sit down at my writing desk and write as long as I possibly can, draining everything that inside of me, thinking of the late John Armstrong as I pelt the plastic turf of the keys, thinking about, in life, how it costs absolutely nothing to give everything that is left inside of your chest and still have enough left over to smile, smoke a cheap cigar, drink a beer with a total stranger and be kind.<br />
<br />
Thank you John.<br />
<br />
Thank you.<br />
</div>
David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-43725970760786151722014-08-18T00:25:00.001-07:002014-08-18T00:25:57.965-07:00
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<span style="font-size: 22pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 22pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yorick</span><span style="font-size: 22pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: Calibri;">, </span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 22pt; line-height: 115%;">Robin Williams Never Played<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Socrates was the name of my friend’s cat<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">(or just plain Socks, for short)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dripped from
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Light of the
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Pitched Nanu-nanus, sad all<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Alone while
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">by himself, tourniquet waistline<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But could not
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_bIUfj2pRFdjbRTmOzKh-4Ig1rJeWJZUKVHqq1zpeD6IrvmvtyARflmPAlyiPvU3N7sqapYRjigH4cOwefPWztTw9csWV4F-nIjWYg5Cst2MJ8onmXY6SXlEPtYsPFi8NVAod1g/s1600/Robin_Williams.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_bIUfj2pRFdjbRTmOzKh-4Ig1rJeWJZUKVHqq1zpeD6IrvmvtyARflmPAlyiPvU3N7sqapYRjigH4cOwefPWztTw9csWV4F-nIjWYg5Cst2MJ8onmXY6SXlEPtYsPFi8NVAod1g/s1600/Robin_Williams.jpg" height="320" width="213" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">While twin time zones east<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The Polydactyl pulse<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of Socrates
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Fell listless and asleep <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">in my friend Valena’s gentle<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>arms having
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the week
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">emaciated <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>limp sagebrush of poof<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>leaving us
the same hour we heard<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the news that
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">My friend burying her lap <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Pet of fourteen year behind <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>childhood<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Home destroyed by the tornado last <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">November now almost rebuilt<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Masonic nest of brick and mortar<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Planted in the earth of Tazewell county.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Like Socrates (the philosopher)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I couldn’t
help but be around<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">You in the Athens of late-80’s video stores.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Shouting Good morning to war I no <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Longer believed in, licking the ash<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Flecks of dead poets like cocaine<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Mortgaging rosebud calendar squares. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Scaling the podium of my classroom<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Desk, naked, with a copy of Leave of Grass<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">To Tell you how much I love <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Sucking helium out of Aladdin’s lamp <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Kiss the white soda of your lips<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Until a resuscitating caricatured hiccup <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Attired
cartoon-voice yawns into <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Awakenings of chartered time, this never<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Neverland prodigal shadow of reality<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Faceless tint the valence heckles <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Faces of the crowd from somewhere beyond.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">How I wanted to hold you<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Sit next to you<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Lodged in a therapist’s office<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Extrapolating romantic theorems of loss<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">With mathematical savants<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Sitting next to the person<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Who has no friends at AA <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Meeting just to make them feel<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Special, flus Pomegranate grin<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Death, incumbent, arriving <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">When we least expect it a<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Viable canvas of impressionistic <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Painting, the light bulb scalp<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Eight year leukemia patient<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Smiling when
the Doctor walks in.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Looking for you now even today still,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Traipsing the streets of San Francisco <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">clad in Geriatric drag<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Simply to see forehead of someone we<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>once were <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Hoping I would somehow find you once again<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Skirting the womb of the Universe in an<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>roc’s auk <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>egg<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Thinking how sometimes, in life, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">You just have to make silly voices<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">At times when you feel no one<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is paying
attention, laughing<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">at the loss, subtle disintegration of our body<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Keening what dreams of Jest that <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">somehow yet may come<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Infinite
borne on the back a thousand times<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Saying alas, I knew him all too well.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-54729437882721217332014-08-11T00:13:00.000-07:002014-08-18T00:15:07.426-07:00
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<span class="usercontent"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"></span></span> </div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZqtvLdzOz33n3OytybXpCl14QEmVuTZ65rGynK3Kddi_Cx8_allLyhgsE1gX6unLqHOIQq0EkELwPFkrMVHtiKfFzfzK_RzyhtWk6NpvpCi5BXdUGnOTyXjlnBw-OuknJyRaOLw/s1600/poet460.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZqtvLdzOz33n3OytybXpCl14QEmVuTZ65rGynK3Kddi_Cx8_allLyhgsE1gX6unLqHOIQq0EkELwPFkrMVHtiKfFzfzK_RzyhtWk6NpvpCi5BXdUGnOTyXjlnBw-OuknJyRaOLw/s1600/poet460.jpg" height="384" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span class="usercontent"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"></span></span> </div>
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<span class="usercontent"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN;"></span></span> </div>
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<span class="usercontent"><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN;">Here's
me pushing my desk into the middle of the room, stepping on top of it like an
Olympic podium of hope and bowing my head in comedic deference and eternal
gratitude saying "O captain My captain!! " Love you Robin. Nanu
fucking nanu</span><span style="font-family: Calibri;">…</span></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-81369899090578438922014-02-27T06:48:00.000-08:002014-02-28T17:54:33.998-08:00Robert 'Psalm,' grandfather to us all, in a way...<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">My favorite memories of the benevolent
tell-it-like-it-is bullfrog- baritone yawp of my surrogate granpa are thricefold.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There was the time when I was fourteen and
had just won this trip to England and one Sunday during Lent shortly before I
was to leave Grandpa Salm reeled me aside when everyone was egressing the pews
and exiting the sanctuary and handed me an envelope with twenty dollars. I
humbly accepted the envelope thinking he was handing me a financial gratuity to
go and knock myself out with in London. Instead he told me to take the money
and find this Podunk out of the way pharmacy somewhere south of SoHo that,
according to him, had the ‘best damn razors’ on<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>the planet, and to pick him up twenty dollars worth of razors for him
while I was in England to smuggle back home. (note: it remains the only time I
have ever heard anyone curse inside Christ Lutheran church). I never got a
chance to find the Pharmacy my entire four days in London and kept the envelope
in my pocket the duration of the trip, guilt ridden that I was not able to
placate his request. The next time I saw Granpa Salm was during Beth and
Shawna’s Confirmation. I went up to him after the service handed him back the
envelope and apologized profusely for not being able to locate the pharmacy and
purchase the razors on my thoroughly chartered<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>sojourn. I handed him back the envelope with the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>funds apologizing again <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and he just looked at me disappointed and
said, “Well, you tried.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">My next favorite memory of Grandpa Salm was about a
year later… I was stranded in line to purchase Madrigal tickets at Limestone
High school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was next to my best
friend David Hale and somehow we<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>ended
up<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in line for six hours straight seated
right next to Granpa. For those of you who were blessed to know Grandpa Salm
know that it didn’t matter who you were, he would come up next to you, give you
a left-handed side-chop in the waist and simply say, “Hey” in a deep soulful
tenor. He would then (lovingly) talk the lobe of your ear off from here<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>until Kingdom come.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My best friend David Hale is also somewhat of
a gregarious chatterer and for (six) hours they talked incessantly about the
politics, blathering on about the proverbial,
“what-is-wrong-with-the-world-these-days,” with mostly Grandpa Salm
pontificating and David Hale lovingly concurring, “Yes, I have often thought
that many times myself” for six hours straight like a choral round. Charlie
Best, who was working class and went to our church, was seated on a lawn chair
perusing the Sunday paper near the front of the line.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During Grandpa Slam and Hale’s marathon
verbal discourse I shot Charlie a glance, a facial SOS and Charlie just looked
up rolled his eyes, ruffled the paper and pretended we didn’t exist.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">There are other memories. Shortly after his wife
died Grandpa Salm began going to auctions and one day, from out of the Picasso
blue, he called me and told me that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he
found an antique 1940’s era radio and asked me if I would like it. I conceded,
figuring I would see him at the next holiday and he would forget about it. The
next day grandpa Salm arrived at my house he had radio the size of an Egyptian
sarcophagus in the back of his truck. He handed me some ropes and together we
lugged the beast into my living room and, while thanking him for the
spontaneous gift he winked and told me, “Don’t be a stranger to an old
granpa.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also remember (this would
have been circa 87) Aunt Linn and Uncle Larry had a retirement party for him at
their house off airport rd. When you are ten years old the front lawn is the
size of a football field (plus it had a slip-n-slide!!!) and I remember trying
to be an adult even though I was an ingénue-cheek ten year old with auburn
bangs and going up to him and congratulating him from all the years he worked
at Keystone Steel<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and Granpa Salm
swiveled his chin and turned to me and said, “You know what. You never stop
learning. You learn something new every day.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The last time I saw Grandpa Salm was at Shawna’s
wedding two years ago. If you see pictures from the wedding he looked dapper
with his cane, a patriarch posing next to the ivory drape of the bride,
demure-eyed, yet proud. He would be too ill to attend Jayma’s wedding last
June, but his spirit was resilient and poetically pervasive and you could hear
the thunderous echo of our family bloodline in the toast Uncle Larry gave his
youngest daughter wishing her the wisdom and grace that is her Christian family
bloodline, deeply rooted in faith as it is planted in the soil of the lolling
rustic hills outside of Bartonville.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">But my favorite memory of Grandpa Salm is
collectively culled from about 20 years ago when Uncle Larry was building their
house out in Limestone township. Uncle Larry hired apostles to help him erect
the abode of his dreams: There was his brother-in-law Alan and Andy Moore and
the endearing harlequin handymanship of my own father. Grandpa Slam was also
assisting. He was almost 70 and had cheek of Redman and was cursing and
spitting tobacco, and occasionally turning to Andy Moore and slapping him into
his waist and saying something inappropriate but the whole time he assisted in
constructing the house you could tell there was a joy on his lips. Like he was
doing something he loved and when I looked at him I thought he was the coolest
old man<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>my eyes had ever seen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-37739162269178263822014-02-02T17:46:00.000-08:002014-03-03T04:30:41.031-08:00Flippant quip that got me exiled from FaceBook<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKEp68hbNS7gb875keyrVgNNQhxSL8_nVRuf42c8nskRiTHP-sRQDknzDlTelEtdaeWQMtXKqTIoNMn1gtVXigNqXM94F6RgU09rO_gL2037jyd3hPwneShfIZptQyH8sKVGX-qA/s1600/hhhh.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKEp68hbNS7gb875keyrVgNNQhxSL8_nVRuf42c8nskRiTHP-sRQDknzDlTelEtdaeWQMtXKqTIoNMn1gtVXigNqXM94F6RgU09rO_gL2037jyd3hPwneShfIZptQyH8sKVGX-qA/s1600/hhhh.png" height="266" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<span lang="EN" style="color: #333333; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><em>“When I was 7 years old I was molested by Woody Allen. I was just innocuously practicing my tennis swing when Uncle Woody handed me a vial of his antidepressants and a copy of Crime and Punishment and then went at it. It really sucks because I was hoping to get sexually molested by the Diane Keaton of Annie Hall, the ingénue-eyed Mariel Hemingway of Manhattan or that hot chick from Match Point (the classy British chick. Phuck Scarlet Johannson). He bribed me with Knicks tickets and then took me to see Miss Saigon, lulling me to sleep with the dulcet octaves of his clarinet before instituting the molestation all over again. Lucky, I was able to go over to my good friend Philip Seymour Hoffman’s house and watch Trainspotting for solace… “</em></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p> </o:p></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">When you are a writer you write about everything. You constantly push the sociological barometer in an endeavor to chauffer your readers into viewing the periphery of this planet from a different plateau. A different cosmological tumbling parallax. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A poetic purlieu. If yer a writer your only job is to take someone you have never met somewhere they I have never been before, or never travelled gladly and beyond....</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">to read my elbow rant in its wayward entirety click here...<a href="http://vegantilvalentiensday.blogspot.com/2014/02/day-21-superbowl-souffle-freedom-of.html" target="_blank">http://vegantilvalentiensday.blogspot.com/2014/02/day-21-superbowl-souffle-freedom-of.html</a></span></div>
David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-79792210034756279222013-12-29T13:50:00.000-08:002013-12-30T14:01:35.868-08:00Drinking beer around the holdiays...
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibT-zrOXBpmTZ6b3t5nfD3UHTmUzFOAhC-NVvVbzjy2dJaEbTNFqKxJyoGQdmDhcpxDNw0afUVRY7hqLQSMA4G9JTnxHgrCv-AWdl5IolHkasaT5BmdV4ZGJdgGopdU-nnXbt9jg/s1600/drunk_santa1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibT-zrOXBpmTZ6b3t5nfD3UHTmUzFOAhC-NVvVbzjy2dJaEbTNFqKxJyoGQdmDhcpxDNw0afUVRY7hqLQSMA4G9JTnxHgrCv-AWdl5IolHkasaT5BmdV4ZGJdgGopdU-nnXbt9jg/s1600/drunk_santa1.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There’s just something about drinking Craft BEER<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Around the holidays, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>holly
and Ivy applauding<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Oval lipped wreathes awaiting <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Wide-eyed new year inaugural swig<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">(rose bowl) Vats of tinsel flavored beer<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There’s just something about drinking (beer)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Screeching<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Amethyst<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>solstice pink <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">squinting<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>across<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the panoramic dry eraser board of the west <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">peach lights fizzing into inky cognizance <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Clydesdales sipping from the antipodal trough in the
nativity scene <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Neighborhood Bar
transitioning into a diminutive Christmas village<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Fraught with carolers and coasters<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Drinking holiday beer on the obligatory pictorial x-mas card<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dissipated Puddle
around the pitcher of poured draught<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Crimson Frosty Snowman melting in a greenhouse <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">conveniently located at the north pole,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">There’s just something about drinking (Beer) amidst</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Festooned wicks dripping off gutters in illuminated
pout, drinking<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">In the starchy nest of Santa’s lap<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Supplicating Ewok Village awaiting sozzled<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>St. Nick,
lumbering<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>down the brick chute<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With a pony<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>keg and 12 pack over the girth of his
shoulders<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid1zo4kxB90lOahoCB6vVIk7iFgJj9IjWDhyphenhyphen4gilDLRSfUP94bWjvUsfV2wUOhftPLhMO0XnZ3vWPv1910roCX1foWCW9sA3lX9sWrfv2GpH0jXfsA3pOogHCnF5eA4CjZh47Sow/s1600/1486739_10202342907589053_622810256_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid1zo4kxB90lOahoCB6vVIk7iFgJj9IjWDhyphenhyphen4gilDLRSfUP94bWjvUsfV2wUOhftPLhMO0XnZ3vWPv1910roCX1foWCW9sA3lX9sWrfv2GpH0jXfsA3pOogHCnF5eA4CjZh47Sow/s640/1486739_10202342907589053_622810256_n.jpg" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></o:p> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></o:p> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></o:p> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></o:p> </div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Something about Sticking
your lips <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">into a dollop tundra of foam<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">As if pressing your tongue to a frozen<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">water pump handle at recess, or</span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><o:p> </o:p>Conveniently handing George Bailey <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">the amber holster of a Schlitz<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Cozening him not to leap<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Lips smiling head of duck<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">At the Chinese Christmas table<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Severed in one wisp of the cleaver<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">While you wore second hand glasses<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">The Christmas story even you forgot<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: inherit;">There's just something about drinking (beer) </span></o:p></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Kissing the cherry peppermint <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">breath of the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>elf you
adore<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Hoping you can buy her enough (BEER)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">To wake up next to her nine hours later<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">wearing only an ugly Christmas t-shirt<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">And panties her hair an unkempt <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Halo sitting atop tree of limbs<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A star of David shimming
in<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The east of her </span>eyes.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: Calibri;"></span> </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq45NwvcFAA5iy0Pm5vNtqgg24hj_CrT1XMTOkka3lXNgeq971XB6UjvX71SXCevEytQ30oBQFwz82m58CuKcvdL-koxxUNduGA_q86FprLtwz0DNBIgcIf9hBVNSfAF5tPy3AFw/s1600/484306_898023571715_850129087_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjq45NwvcFAA5iy0Pm5vNtqgg24hj_CrT1XMTOkka3lXNgeq971XB6UjvX71SXCevEytQ30oBQFwz82m58CuKcvdL-koxxUNduGA_q86FprLtwz0DNBIgcIf9hBVNSfAF5tPy3AFw/s400/484306_898023571715_850129087_n.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Calibri;"><o:p></o:p></span> </div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: Calibri;"> </span></o:p></div>
David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-26878853461329241782013-12-27T10:03:00.000-08:002013-12-28T10:54:50.701-08:0012 beers of Tartan day 11:Taking a post-coital holiday dump with a dark Elf...<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrCblgnxjfx6bNV93ij9OLFomo9VTNm_utR1rJFnysPST_crPc7y88k21SnnPhxxsB89yL0UxUDTclUYk2JdZftY5_m1kJn_gSxIrQvsXqg6TEX3e8KAnCHlz4nf6oCKG5aXxUYg/s1600/dark%2520horse%25204%2520elf.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrCblgnxjfx6bNV93ij9OLFomo9VTNm_utR1rJFnysPST_crPc7y88k21SnnPhxxsB89yL0UxUDTclUYk2JdZftY5_m1kJn_gSxIrQvsXqg6TEX3e8KAnCHlz4nf6oCKG5aXxUYg/s320/dark%2520horse%25204%2520elf.jpg" width="248" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
The final two beers featured on the Tartan Inn winter tour are the Jordan and Pippen of the brewsky holiday season. Dark Horse's 4 elf winter warmer Ale is more naughty than nice, leaving your lips coated in a spicy residue that feels like you just monopolized the last half-hour beneath a malty mistletoe making out with the Ginger bread man. This beer doesn't play any reindeer games, it creates them. The first sip destroys the interior of your palate with hints of cinnamon and nutmeg swathed in a subtle slurp of cloves. Yes, it dominates, tackles your tongue like Santa endeavoring to harness the reins on his docile ferrying doe-eyed mammals<br />
. <br />
It more than just stuffs your stocking. <br />
<br />
It erupts in a festive chariot of holiday flavor.<br />
<br />
One beer left to go...<br />
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<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvls3S5-3PJQs8paCD1FyAqhyphenhyphenTEkzl_98DT2NOnGFkAeDEfTps-A0D0XP-i88bOu0Znw_TNzGUVgDXGXb6ZWp3uKTkCnWBBSVvxjk6ssJxYAxIt8WgIVnKriPTqAVyFt2x2obh2w/s1600/joe+beer.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvls3S5-3PJQs8paCD1FyAqhyphenhyphenTEkzl_98DT2NOnGFkAeDEfTps-A0D0XP-i88bOu0Znw_TNzGUVgDXGXb6ZWp3uKTkCnWBBSVvxjk6ssJxYAxIt8WgIVnKriPTqAVyFt2x2obh2w/s1600/joe+beer.png" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">drinking' santa's private reserve ale w. co-owner Joe Hauk</td></tr>
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Christmas is officially over...let's shoot santa....<br />
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David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-41362189807792548772013-12-26T09:49:00.000-08:002013-12-27T09:49:58.081-08:0012 beers of tartan day 10: Accumulation winter seasonal<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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It's the day after Christmas and I'm, in the immortal words of Clark Griswold, hap-hap-happily hungover with Dean Martin and Danny fucking kay sippin' an Accumulation, a seminally hoppy white India Pale Ale winter seasonally crafted by our fair-weather friends' at Fat Tire. The label itself shows a picture of a very winteresque 'If the trailer is a-rockin' don't come a knockin' stationary RV,' and the beer presents a palatable snowflake succulent aftertaste lightly sprinkled with a bouquet of hops. The two bad boy (big boy) beers on tap for the next two days. Can't wait!!!<br />
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Hope you had a Merry Christmas. Holy shit.<br />
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..and don't forget the Tartan winter beer tour blowout this Saturday night!!!<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">only two beers left on my tour!!!!</td></tr>
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<br />David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-61325137989465360252013-12-25T14:07:00.000-08:002014-02-28T18:06:06.198-08:00Merry Christmas fellow scribes!!! (and leftover holiday heaps of sibling rivalry as well)...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="userContent">..as a testament to my literary bachelorhood, this Christmas I received, a fart mug from my sister <a data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=100001135591441&extragetparams=%7B%22directed_target_id%22%3A0%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/bethany.vonbehrenobrien">Bethany VonBehren O'Brien</a> (which, ironically, sounds just like my inflated muffled editor in New York) a SMELL MY NUTS candle from my (innocuo<span class="text_exposed_show">us) sis' <a data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=517289380&extragetparams=%7B%22directed_target_id%22%3A0%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/jennifer.vonbehren.gordon">Jenn Gordon</a> and a (I have never heard of it before) Poo-pouri (a sort of hygienic tonic use to douse and quell the noxious anatomical odors of, well) from my blithe cousin <a data-hovercard="/ajax/hovercard/user.php?id=197103486&extragetparams=%7B%22directed_target_id%22%3A0%7D" href="https://www.facebook.com/jayma.lynne">Jayma Lynne</a> which I randomly picked up in our annual Dirty Santa...I tell you, all I can say is, come here an pull my finger....(oh, and happy new year!!!)</span></span></div>
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David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-88440480010083698942013-12-24T23:45:00.003-08:002013-12-26T05:36:17.369-08:00Day 8/9: Christmas eve with a Goose Island (and Founder's Breakfast Stout) frothing forth with indelible memories of Christmas' past...<br />
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Day 8 on the 12 Beers of Tartan is Goose Island Harvest Ale, intrinsically an autumnal beer. If you would like to read how this author feels about drinking beer in autumn (my favorite literary season) click <a href="http://miredmusings.blogspot.com/2013/11/beer-in-autumn.html" target="_blank">here</a> to read a poem I wrote about the subject (yes, I really did run naked with a sylvan herd of deer next to the police station in Marquette Heights after our adrenaline-fueled alcoholic augmented first reading at Tartan Inn). As a festive libation Goose island bottles a beautiful though extremely limited Sixth Day ale whose recipe alters from year to year and whose proceeds go to a Chi-town charity.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The weekend convened slathered in a dusty slate of
ice, the alley and arteries of West Peoria chapped in arctic sheaths of crackling
white, a leftover slice of wedding cake stowed in the bottom depths of the deep
freeze, a swan-song souvenir culled from another time. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since (opportunely speaking) all weather is
bona fide quality beer drinking weather I found myself at the Tartan Saturday
morning drinking with poet Kyle Devalk and hanging out with my dear friend
Gavra Lynn, pounding PBR’s in tandem with <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>high alcoholic quality beers such as HE’BREW
(10 % ABV) while listening to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOaQBiP1_qA" target="_blank">HAIM</a> over and over again ( are we rockin’ the
menorah or what!!!!) My dear friend co-owner and craft beer aficionado Tom
Inman popped in and we had a long discussion about the reissuing of DOGFISHHEAD
and writer Del James. Due to its russet brick exterior drinking at the TI sometimes
feels like you’ve sauntered into a chimney from a Dickens’ novel, although
never a bleak house, just a propensity for Great expectations when it comes
to quality beer, intellectual banter and good times. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The next day I found myself engulfed in the church
of my youth, sitting in the front pews amidst the elbows of my relatives
watching as my cousin Brianna’s daughter dandled in the cradle of my</span> cool cousin <a href="http://miredmusings.blogspot.com/2011/10/its-been-just-over-week-now-since-my.html" target="_blank">Shawna </a>'s arms. Six-month old Kayla Jo then hovered over a diminutive pond of sacrosanct liquid, the Reverend cupping his palms, sprinkling her forehead in the hollowed appellation of whatever universal patriarch, progeny and ubiquitous comsic pulse exists. It felt good to be surrounded by my family,strapped in like a book of Romans roller coaster into the pews the lower Hampshire of my family's collective anatomy once practically mortgaged another lifetime ago. It felt good seeing my former sixth grade geography teacher Ralph Teske ( with his chessey jokes, ie, Climate is what you do to a mountain) and Tom Zaia inquiring if I am still running and trying my best to bite my tongue and say 'Look there's Pastor Schudde!!!' during the Nicene Creed. Felt good performing ordained spiritual calisthenics, standing and sitting, reciting familiar passages in the colloquial droll (after all these years I still have the call to Christian Fellowship memorized!!!) Felt good seeing Gary Heinz, informing him of my recent cross-country camping travels with my friend Valena (ie, we were just on our way to Missouri to by cigarettes when we ended up 18 hours later camping next to the craggy presidential countenances in South Dakota) and thanking Gary, for introducing me to Mattheison State park. For taking me canoing with my father and the late-great Mike Dewitt. </div>
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For instilling in the narrative theme of my life a love of just wanting to be outdoors basking in trees and open cornfields all the time. </div>
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But more than anything else it felt good to sit in an almost football fourth and one huddle with my family and sing Christmas hymns. Those who know me know that I hail from a family of musical savants and how growing up there was always the ivory sprinkling of a piano (or the stringed dirge of a cello or the pubescent squeak of a violin) echoing in the background and both my mom and dual aunts were in charge of nearly all the music at the church. It felt good to sing in a clan of Lutheran limbs again. To hear the guttural bass clef of my Uncle's baritone. To hear my aunt Chris voice flutter into the invisible rungs of sheet music. To watch my mom pray with her hands geometrically configured at almost shoulder level, as if saluting something metaphysical, which indeed, she is. I thought about when my grandma (who attended Christ Lutheran all her life) died and how after the doctors promulgated their grim assessment to family members that she wasn't going to make it through the night--how all of us brought Lutheran hymnals to the hospital and formed a human rhombus around the raft of her hospital bed, singing Lutheran songs as sifted from one port of consciousness into the inscrutable lip of what is to come. </div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I was thinking about my grandma and family and the
evanescent fumblings of the calculated breath of time when I ordered a
</span><a href="http://gearpatrol.com/2013/04/15/malted-madness-round-six-sipping-a-champion/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Breakfast Stout</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"> (or double chocolate coffee oatmeal stout) and held it like a gavel and began to take intermittent swigs.
The label of founders breakfast stout features what looks like a six month old
playing a self-taught rendition of ‘here comes the airplane,’ a pastel Little
Lord Fauntleroy literary born with a silver spoon in his mouth. It is well
known in the brick man cave of T.I that this is one of my favorite winteresque
drops. It’s malty, if brassiere’s correlates with ABV content it would be a
g-cup (8.3%). It doesn’t overwhelm the palate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is the color of the Christmas soil in which the evergreen tree of your
dreams was recently poleaxed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s a mulchy
residue to the brew that isn’t overwhelming plus a coffee-subtle caramel<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>flavor leaving a hickey of hops tucked in
your lips like a wished for venereal disease. It’s a beautiful beer, but what I like most about Founders breakfast
stout is how, by pure color alone, it reminds me of the exact color of the sky
that Christmas eve the year I turned 21. I was working full time at a bookstore
in the mall. It was Christmas Eve and the mall was festooned in spools of corded pine and tinseled garland as throngs of coated patrons forming a flotilla of limbs toting oversized bags milled and clattered and jockeyed for position accompanied by a heralding holiday soundtrack overhead, the masses, the petulant whine of fire-hydrant sized moppets straddling the bulbous contours of Santa’s beer belly, the monotonous din of solicitous salvation army bells clanging in limp cadences in the chestnut-fused distance. As most can attest to, retail sucks year round, and sucks to the nth degree around the holidays. After locking up I walked through the linoleum concourse, walked out to my silver '86 Chevette (color of a can of Coors' Light), accompanied in tempo by frigid bulbs of exhaling breath. I stopped at a Starbucks, fired up a cheap cigar and began to drive, alone, swallowed into an inky vat of winter darkness. It wasn't cloudy but somehow the stars were occluded. There was banks of snow blanketing both sides of the road where, six month time, emerald stalks of corn would salute. I drove for forty-five minutes, the side window half-down, blasting into the country, taking swigs of my coffee, biting into my cigar, thinking of her smile, thinking of her warm neck and kissing her forehead, the crimson splotch of a wayward barn sporadically slouching in the distance. The creature I was visiting lived in the country, about an hour out of town. She was home from college for the holidays. I remember driving up the gravel ribbon of her rustic driveway and, in the cold, watching how the side door of her country house opened like the lids on an advent calendar, seeing her in the doorway of light, wearing a long purple fairy-tale dress, her long blond tresses dripping past the wedding ivory flank of her neck. </span></div>
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She had been waiting for me.</div>
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I left my car and lifted her up. She couldn't stop smiling. We couldn't stop kissing. We couldn't stop wishing each other a merry <span style="font-family: inherit;">christmas.</span></div>
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Later that night we would make love while her parents slept upstairs, our bodies, next to christmas tree in the basement, in the dark, wanting to gnaw into the moment, not wanting to pull out, not wanting to leave this transitory pulse of time.</div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">That was a long time ago and sometimes, it still hurts esp. around the holidays. Just like the finish of the Beakfast Stout some things linger in the holiday hearth of your chest, reeling you back to an earlier time. Dear friends may whatever wounds you harbor this holioday heal in a scab of promise, may whatever libation pours from the draught of your being hold you close until the chartered end of time.</span></div>
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David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-4031293241467423112013-12-23T03:32:00.000-08:002013-12-24T03:33:24.378-08:00Day Seven: Angry Orchard crisp Apple... <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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There's something about the title of this next beer that is all too seemingly reminiscent of that scene from Wizard of OZ where Dorthy and the Scarecrow saunter upon what in retrospect appears to be the animated geriatric wing at the local arboretum fraught with thoroughly baritone-voiced and pissed off botanic limbs hurling the forbidden biblical fruit of Adam in the fashion of balls and strikes. Angry Orchard Crisp Apple (served also on draught at TI) may not get you exiled from either Eden or Emerald City but it should undubitably ensure a munchkin-land smile on your face.<br />
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From the outset I should declare that, with the exception of Strongbow and Woodchuck's Pear the last thing you'll causally see me sipping across the oaky plateau of a neighborhood tap is a hard cider. Perhaps it has to do with a class field trip in thrid grade at Tanner's Orchard and having to urinate and peeing on a nearby apple tree only to realize that Alicia Wycoff was behind me, princess of the crayola kingdom that is elementary school, giggling and gesticulating in confetti cackles, marring the future author with an aversion towards anything apologetically apple for life.<br />
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That said I was surpised how much I enjoyed this beer. Essentially more of a late-autumnal campfire beer, it has a wicked bite, a coppery drizzle, and a slight alchemical Yukon runoff semblance that feels that you have spent the bulk of the day panhandling gold in artcic clime.<br />
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What I enjoy most about the drop is that, while bitter, the tartness doesn't overwhelm you. It settles nicely and (almost) beckons you for an additional round forgoing wizened woodchuck and choosing the wicked cidery witch of the west instead.<br />
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For an apoplectic cider intent on rage, is a very appeasing drink indeed...<br />
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and hey, five more days of the tour and two more days til'....<br />
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David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-91405020678538035982013-12-22T23:07:00.000-08:002013-12-24T02:40:06.392-08:00Tartan Inn Holiday Beer tour Day six: Batch 19<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Perhaps the only thing more enjoyable than drinking beers around the holidays is legally being denied the opportuinity to intrinsically indulge. Being 17 and having a bottle of vodka camoflaged in the back of your closet awaiting the friday night beneath the poetic penumbra of lonely bleachers when your unfledged tastebuds will be tempted with the forbidden alcoholic ambroisa coerecing you to imbibe with burgeoning bliss and sophomoric glee.<br />
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and, hey (shit) its three days til christmas... </div>
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David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-28880009492676871052013-12-21T21:10:00.001-08:002013-12-21T21:26:21.813-08:00Tartan Inn Winter Beer Tour Day 5: Celebrating Solstice with Shiner cheer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The first beer I ever stole was a Shiner's legendary Bock. I was 19 years old and had spent the summer visiting my brothers' Matt Brown and Mark-Andrew Feaster in the inexhaustible swelter that is Dallas, Texas in the summer months. Back then accumulating Shiner's was like trying to sunggle Coors across the Continnetal divide thrity years ago. You just couldn't find it up north. Filching my brothers' fridge and stowing a six-pack in my carry on to nurse on the flight home seemed like a lesser crime.
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rudolph nosed and
cranberry in hue, Shiner’s Holiday cheer is a festive teardrop of a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>dunkleweisen is a intrinsically a dark
wet-dream wheat seasonal, celebrating the gradual preponderance of swelling
darkness into flickering tree lights of another year soulfully eclipsed. The
beer <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>hiccups in a holiday wreath of flavor,
pinching with hints of miracle street molasses married with a splash of peach,
leaving a tinsel aftertaste in the terminal of your lips. It is the perfect
brew to make out with beneath the bough of the mistletoe at the office
Christmas party when the punch bowl has gone dry.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">So
this solstice, under a swelling umbrella of darkness, sip into Shiners holiday
tithe, and wait for the rebirth of light leaking at first in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>coppery alchemical spittles of wheat and
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something soothing for solstice...<br />
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David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-29328751522049866382013-12-20T05:53:00.000-08:002013-12-20T11:34:27.002-08:0012 beers of Tartan Inn.. Day 4 Leinenkugel's Snowdrift Vanilla Porter<br />
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I sold my first short story when I was 19 years of age and, ardently fueled by the incendiary alphabetical embers of literature and all things poetically post-coital, I aptly did what all lapsed Lutheran lads who hail from the genital wart of the Midwest do when they sell their first short story-- I bought a one-way airplane ticket to Appleton, Wisconsin to pursue the benevolent frost-bitten fingertips of the <a href="http://whattheheartisandwhatitfeels.blogspot.com/2013/10/chasing-girl-of-my-dreamsfrom-my-novel.html" target="_blank">proverbial girl of my dreams</a> (i.e., the one who got away--elbow nudge-- eh, son). <br />
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Needless to say it didn't work out. Largely because she was still in high school and still living with her parents. Partly because she harbored loveable jean-jacket Lesbian-proclivities which I adored (she sent me high school standard mixed-tapes of the Indigo Girls). Inevitably I left the state of Wisconsin downtrodden and disconsolate, adverse to all things related to cheap pilsner and overpriced cheese curds.<br />
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Ibid for the Green Bay Packers as well, who opportunely won the Super bowl shortly upon my return.<br />
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That was many blue moons ago and my antipathy towards our northern neighbors has waned, largely in part to the quality libations imported by beers imported by New Glarus and Schell and cheapo Lacrosse and (oh yeah) Jacob Leinenkugel.<br />
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This is a beer that the Tartan has on draft. The beer is gentle and offers a sprouting yet mellifluous pour. For a porter (and I like my Irish brick heavy porters) it baptizes the palate with the trickling pluck of a Christmas Goose feather. Out of the 12 superlative Beers featured on the Tartan Inn's Holiday Beer tour I would argue that this one is the lightest. There is an almost tangible fluff. Like catching a flake of arctic precipitation on the tip of your cheekbone or (after being double-dog dared, of course) sticking your timid schoolboy tongue to the frigid phallus of a courtyard flagpole only to find yourself seconds later,( momentarily, at least) making out with lips of snow angel minutes before she melts in the incipient breath of spring.<br />
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It is a delicate beer. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">drinkin' Snowdrift vanilla porter at T.I w. my good friend Kyle Devalk</td></tr>
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Those who drink with me know that every year during the first breach of accumulative snow, in homage of the late-great Rick Baker, I forgo my allegiance to my beloved <a href="http://miredmusings.blogspot.com/2013/12/12-beers-of-tartan-day-3a-knight-of-sam.html" target="_blank">Sam Adams</a> and plant Moosehead (The beer Baker states in MARY,ME was the 'best damn beer he ever tasted') in the fresh tuft of snow. The last year I found myself inexplicably including the Vanilla porter to keep the Canadian Lager company. Like an ice-sculpture it is delicate and complex, evaporating in snowflakes beckoning the talents of your taste buds to succumb to a second round even if, another Christmas ago, you lost the love of your life, this beer somehow will serve as a bellwether, a harbinger of chin up holiday-hope keeping the kettle of your spirits warm.<br />
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--this is what happens when Ernest drinks too much Linenkugel's around the holidays (note 80's side-pony tail crimped hair girl of my dreams in the background)....David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-18140558661069697692013-12-19T09:07:00.000-08:002013-12-20T12:50:03.574-08:0012 beers of Tartan Day 3...a "knight" of Sam Adams winter Lager<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">-the author showcasing SAM ADAMS' winter lager clad in knightly armor (thanx valena!!!) Time to 'sleigh' some Clydesdales...</td></tr>
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Here's where things gets tricky: I drink more Sam Adams than anyone else I know. For the longest time it was the only quality lager available in soused stumbling distance of my apartment. Cruise the arteries of West Peoria on any odd calendar square and at least four times a week you will espy my lanky gait lugging a cardboard 12-pack of Sam Adams SEASONAL VARIETIES on the girth of my shoulder blade as if ferrying a cube of mortar to construct a pilsner pyramid from Pharaoh's exodus of empty beer-bottles. Perhaps it was my affinity for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNzApsp1ZSQ" target="_blank">Johnny Tremain</a> in 5th grade or that I always kind of always harbored a hardcore Molly Pitcher wearing a three-corner hat and nothing else fetish.<br />
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The first beer I legally purchased on my 21st birthday was a six pack of Sam Adams Boston Lager from the now defunct Sullivan's grocery in Campus Town. Since then I literally drool like a pissed-off Pavlovian Chihuahua if I am denied my weekly fix. No other American beer company that I know of goes out of its way to alchemically concoct a yearly of array of <a href="http://www.samueladams.com/craft-beers" target="_blank">diverse and virile-brew</a> in seasonal tempo with the gulp of each season. They have a beer that perfectly correlates in tandem with the taste buds of every week of the year. How I adore the subtle splash of hops hinted in the Latitude, White Water or Noble Pils IPA. How nothing beats watching nonstop repeated viewings of Boondock Saints and Good Will Hunting (both Boston milieu-flavored movies) on St. Patrick's Day while swiging an Irish Red or a (hard to find these days) Boston Ale or a Ruby Mild. How I always find myself taking a seminal swig off a bottle of Alpine Spring tailgating with my raucous bothers outside what to me will always be Comsikey park on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_m3qy2O7bA" target="_blank">opening day</a>, my south side hardcore unyielding White Sox pride cemented with every crisp swallow or re-watching Johnny Tremain after drinking (at the Tartan) during the West Peoria fourth of July parade sipping on a Revolutionary Rye Ale later that night, the breezy still-life wisp of dusk transitions into an thunderous applause of stratospheric neon shingles or come late summer, smoking my pipe on my back steps, reading William Faulkner, dipping into the avuncular swill that is Porch Rocker or walking barefoot through the stolid crunch of variegated auburn leaves abutting the lower level of Bradley park in early November quoting Walt Whitman while covertly nursing a Harvest Ale thinking how every human being living in this area code should sneak a beer into Bradley park and crunch around in the leaves sans shoes.<br />
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This is Sam Adams and my affinity for their product and deference in the disciplinary art of craft beer runs deep.<br />
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They simply do not make a bad drop. <br />
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That said, Winter Lager is one of my least favorites. Not that its a bad beer, because its not. It pours like a friendly vat of molasses. It's spicy. It's the perfect holiday beer back to something wickedly potent like Rumplemintz or Goldschlager. It's just that when you compare it other holiday brews Sam Adams produces, chiefly White Christmas and the formidable Old Fezziwig Ale is falls a few French fries short of a happy meal.<br />
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But its still a good fucking beer (better than any of the recently released Budweiser project-12 thoroughly watered down releases) and, if you find yourself at Tartan Inn, I would not hesitate to <br />
order a Winter Lager, take a meditative silent-night sip, think about Christmases past, and, )oh yes) smile.<br />
<br />
..but maybe I'm readily amiss...Let's ask Santa Claus and Superman what they think about Sam Adams Winter Lager.<br />
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David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-32782850548683942552013-12-18T03:57:00.000-08:002013-12-19T05:52:17.688-08:0012 Beers of Tartan DAY 2 ANCHOR STEAM ANNUAL CHRISTMAS ALE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj92fOtUPDMa5MjifTGPZgWpNLjuhnLGXK5o_RbBq0Eeyd66nf_f0wBZRN0hEQ1Zwm084ctMSGCp2EoJYHxoN1R4du9Y2iZHW4UCmknIGUL8wMoRQKk1KuXsCI7YmC0KpEgxKdlTA/s1600/anchor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj92fOtUPDMa5MjifTGPZgWpNLjuhnLGXK5o_RbBq0Eeyd66nf_f0wBZRN0hEQ1Zwm084ctMSGCp2EoJYHxoN1R4du9Y2iZHW4UCmknIGUL8wMoRQKk1KuXsCI7YmC0KpEgxKdlTA/s1600/anchor.jpg" /></a></div>
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This is the naughty bad (big) boy beer that would have notably been excluded from Santa's doubly scrutinized list of domestically docile "acceptable boring obeying good little boy beers" with the exception that it knocked ol' Kris Kringle off his reindeer-driven pony Keg ass. This is the 39th consecutive year the San Francisco based-brewery has a released a limited edition holiday ale. Like our good friends' from <a href="http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/goose-island-sixth-day/233672/" target="_blank">Goose Island</a> three hours north, Anchor Brewery alters the recipe of their holiday brew every year, offering continental craft beer connoisseurs across the snow globe with the annual gift of a new label and the transitory taste of a year gone pabst (sic), the promise of what it is to come with every sentimental swig this indelible libation willfully avails.<br />
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Here is why this beer is just fucking amazing:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0vFnnqt3KETICTsVCFlDnCzlinWarHQ-GYWtTsHKtmowYSAu4tmOkOgSnk2gnvkVrlnNZduPRs4zmWcQbI5nzKIE-ZHxjJv3N-DCSWIKgXpIFtLMWCDwgvDD-q43nqYD9JNh-BA/s1600/christmas_ale_2013.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0vFnnqt3KETICTsVCFlDnCzlinWarHQ-GYWtTsHKtmowYSAu4tmOkOgSnk2gnvkVrlnNZduPRs4zmWcQbI5nzKIE-ZHxjJv3N-DCSWIKgXpIFtLMWCDwgvDD-q43nqYD9JNh-BA/s1600/christmas_ale_2013.png" width="178" /></a>Black as peasants' coal, it looks like Scrooge's overturned Dickensian top hat when it is poured. It has a fluffed-licorice flavored petite peppermint aftertaste that lingers on the rooftop of your palate long after St. Nick has scraped shingles off the top of your subdivision. It is pinched with spices and hop heavy on the alcoholic content caliber. In a nod to Good King Guinness-ceslas, it if light and heavy all at the same time, reflecting how I feel about the holiday clime, light and airy with the dalliance of yuletide, heavy and bruising with fleeting memories of yesterday. I had this beer early in the tour (say around thanksgiving) and then had a few more last Saturday when my dear friend <a href="http://succulentsobriety.blogspot.com/2013/05/day-15-dream-dalliance-and-gift-of.html" target="_blank">Gavra Lynn</a> (who alchemically concocts a mean Bloody Mary)and I felt exactly the same, I poured the beer and held the glass up to the loops of pine festively festooned above the bar, brandishing my beer like a conductor brandishes a baton prior to the annual holiday showing of the Beer drinkers nutcracker ( a bunch of middle age overweight lads flouncing around stage with their shirts off to the music of Tchaikovsky) feeling like I was about ready to conduct a timeless orchestral movement, not realizing that the symphony was sifting eloquently in my mouth with every sip of this ornate holiday brew.<br />
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David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-89810705729881290282013-12-17T09:48:00.000-08:002013-12-21T10:32:29.013-08:0012 beers of Tartan Day 1 Sierra Neveda Celebration Ale<div style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZUsHZz3QmwBEwsaSYBEhKB9LbV6lLyiUfN0_zaHNBCFaq8h2R13CZIfaS0i6_X6eQuTCmSSpp72BPeopVkrIfFfwa-uzbtOHjBSDdrZ9QuchiTQQVAYDPqlpiQXc8-Jg_oiBxOg/s1600/sierra_nevada_celebration_ale.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZUsHZz3QmwBEwsaSYBEhKB9LbV6lLyiUfN0_zaHNBCFaq8h2R13CZIfaS0i6_X6eQuTCmSSpp72BPeopVkrIfFfwa-uzbtOHjBSDdrZ9QuchiTQQVAYDPqlpiQXc8-Jg_oiBxOg/s1600/sierra_nevada_celebration_ale.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"> </a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCZcNIWm8zMOm5bK57vdD3sAmr1Oep-BKcN8Y5IH1YMrfmNGo2E5bAkiVrd9glR8imoIDsYYTDnilZHP4qaCC_WPAiX9wmT0qEFTmbHSqGrWsZ2RYDKnHceyE3jpeqBGO9fyTFSg/s1600/tisdga.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="354" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCZcNIWm8zMOm5bK57vdD3sAmr1Oep-BKcN8Y5IH1YMrfmNGo2E5bAkiVrd9glR8imoIDsYYTDnilZHP4qaCC_WPAiX9wmT0qEFTmbHSqGrWsZ2RYDKnHceyE3jpeqBGO9fyTFSg/s1600/tisdga.png" width="640" /></a><br />
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As a holiday greeting card of gratitude for graciously allowing us to host our monthly <a href="http://miredmusings.blogspot.com/2013/11/thanks-to-everyone-who-came-out-and.html" target="_blank">OPEN MIC POETRY READING</a> at their fine West Peoria watering hole I've decided to chronicle the 12 BEERS Tartan Inn has festively featured on their WINTER BEER TOUR. All the beers are currently showcased at Tartan Inn (i.e., the neighborhood bar of my dreams). On Saturday Dec 28th--Day 12- the Tartan will host a Winter beer blow out so be sure to stop in, ask for a beer tour card and imbibe in seasonal caroling-crafted bliss spotlighting Beers that are holiday Nutcrackers trouncing the entry of anything domestic and mass marketed and overtly watered-down. Beers that deck the interior lining of your liver with boughs of mistletoes and streams of lights. Beers that plant a poinsettia on the tip of your palette, washing away the beechwood aged transgressions of a year gone past. <br />
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First on the tour is Celebration Ale, an amber-hued IPA that pours like a stocking filled with hops. Tartan has this beer on draught and it gushes into the translucent splash of the chalice in hibernating treacles of icicles at first, prior to filling the receptacle with a sudsy wreath of foam. Those who are audacious enough carouse with me on a weekly basis know that I harbor a hardcore affinity for hops (check out SN's <a href="http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/sierra-nevada-bigfoot/371/" target="_blank">BIGFOOT</a> later this year), what is enriching about the Celebration ale is the dimension of hop subtly. It doesn't set off New Year fireworks in your mouth, rather it sleigh rides down the copse your palette, leaving your lips satisfied and your spirits all but warm. <br />
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--see what happens when Pee-Wee Herman drinks Sierra Nevada at the Tartan around the holdiays!!!</div>
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David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-70677000678141757302013-12-13T03:07:00.000-08:002013-12-15T03:42:06.982-08:00Masturbatory Masterpiece...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ491eI_RKAyhHODVjMccFxqY0qOGYUKo4aQ2pcsq7DqY2NVtH67bRKA-BwStFHzBmiuPVPOtwA3JC0LQbkMt6TQYufHl84F4GyQHVsjOma_toue-1cwUhUj8u6QD7KziwweRpaA/s1600/hmmm.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQ491eI_RKAyhHODVjMccFxqY0qOGYUKo4aQ2pcsq7DqY2NVtH67bRKA-BwStFHzBmiuPVPOtwA3JC0LQbkMt6TQYufHl84F4GyQHVsjOma_toue-1cwUhUj8u6QD7KziwweRpaA/s1600/hmmm.png" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Hailed in underground Literary octagons as a punk-lit
post-modern “masturbatory masterpiece,” </span><a href="http://afailedcampaign.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"><span style="font-family: inherit;">WHAT WE WERE BEFORE WE MADE SOMETHING OF OURSELVES</span></a><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(often referred to by its
street name as Yellow Monkey Bars and Unbidden Erections – a failed campaign)
is a sprawling 1100 page anvil -heavy Britannica of sorrow, a linguistic
continent littered with paragraphs of hurt,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>an emotional exegesis imprisoning the bellowing clangs of the human
heart. Written between 2000-2007 and tattooed in the tonal inflection of such
narrative masters as David Foster Wallace and William Gaddis YMBUE chronicles
the formative foibles and poetic puberty of four friends as they sociologically
skid through the gilded guillotine Mascot-headed hallways<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of Christian- Logos Seminary <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(an ersatz liturgical academy with a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>hippo pond, a 70’s flavored flower-power
Jesus Gymnasium, the world’s Largest indoor biblical themed mini-golf course
and a Versailles sized oscillating working mobile of the solar system) while
evading the hegemonic hell of the bullying VARSITE ELITE basketball squad
orchestrated by a sex-obsessed Headmaster via clambering up the rungs of their
imagination.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Gargantuan and bawdy, Rabelaisian in girth and propensity <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>featuring Buster Highman (a Bavarian flatulent
artist), Lynnford Collins ( a 13 year old drag queen) and Judith Goldstein (the
closet Jew) and showcasing one of the most endearing protagonists to come along
in contemporary letters YMBUE is a panegyric hymn to the Pale King Peoria of
yesterday (ahem Lums on Western) a super hero swan song to both the transitory
echoes of youth as well as a zany semi-autobiographical picaresque meditation
on what we intrinsically were before we made something of ourselves.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Starting in
mid-November 2012 a fractal (chapter) will be posted every day until the novel
is posted in its entirety Sept 2013.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Feel free to slip in for a verbal nightcap or peruse an
occasional post and (as always) thanx for readin’!!!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-33213675465583138292013-12-05T06:51:00.001-08:002013-12-05T10:06:01.059-08:00Letter to those he loves most in this world...preamble to my novel YELLOW MONKEY BARS & UNBIDDEN ERECTIONS-a failed campaign-...<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The novel in autumn 2004 (note floppy and zip drives)...one phuckava sprawling-ass manuscript....</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I don’t remember it like it was the proverbial
yesterday but I remember it vividly nonetheless. I was blanketed in a sheath of
autumnal light rereading a copy of Irvine Welsch’s TRAINSPOTTING next to a
window on the sixth floor of Milner library at Illinois State University. It
was after Vanessa and the van o’ Hale and smoking cigars while desultorily
driving around feelin’ too good to go into work today. It was after Zachary was
born. After drinking beer while basking in the incendiary glare of a bonfire at
Jackie’s out on Airport road. After Laurianne had returned to France (and
Patrick had traversed overseas to find her once again). It was after the
dissolution of B. Dalton and Maid-Rite and a movie. After a voluptuous <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Amber (calling Hale, myself answering
mistaking him for another less fortunate David) thanked me gratuitously over
the phone for the flowers I had purportedly sent her for her boob job (note:
did she say ‘boob’?).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was after the
Drac mobile, after imbibing infinite amounts of unlimited carafes of coffee
while performing botched Tarentino impersonations coddled between the vinyl
nests of clattering banter that was Lums. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">It was after <a href="http://miredmusings.blogspot.com/2013/11/eternal-devotional-gratatitude-towards.html" target="_blank">Freudian Press </a>had dissolved.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">It was after our sojourns to Wyld Side cabaret. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">After Hale planted his grandparents into the scalp
of the planet.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">It was well after Patrick’s all-night-birthday party
extravaganza where we would each woof down an entire Little Caesar’s Pizza
while clacking dice before disappearing into the woods for pre-dawn water gun
warship. It was after Downs Circle, after Warren espied Patrick perusing a
Playboy which he deemed was merely a tattered copy of ‘Nintendo Power.’ <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">It was after Marvel and DC. After the Yellow Monkey
bars at CLS had been uprooted to pave way for an additional basketball
gymnasium.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">It was after, yet before, Metallica started to
royally suck goats. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ironically, it
was around the same time Lums on Western shushed the welcoming tint of its
doors for all eternity.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">It was autumn; thirteen expired eliptical loops
around the sun ago when sitting in the milner Library I decided to chronicle
the foibles of those friends’ whom I love most of all in this world,
toimmortalize our misadventures via words aiming<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>for a fifty page manuscript by Christmas.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On Halloween
I came back to Peoria with twelve double spaced comic-sans goth fonted pages
(none of which still exist). By the holidays it was 120. By Easter that year
three hundred (sing-spaced).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I worked as
a Teacher’s Aid, moved in with Dave Thompson on High Street. When my father
died suddenly in Feb ’02 the manuscript was 600 pages (maybe 100 of which have
sieved into the final draft). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">It sat like a fecund hen waiting to lay a Faberge
egg. I went back to Bradley. I worked 80 hours a week. I lived with Hale. I
lived with a Psychic who will perennially be Gandalf to my Frodo. I lugged the
manuscript with me everywhere I went like a sac of irish potatoes the day after
the feminine ended. I referred to it as my illegitimate daughter. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">"Want to see a picture of my illegitimate daughter?" I would ay before plopping down the 500 page dossier of hurt.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I revised incessantly. In august 2003, three years
after I had started the ‘script, I had a break through and started pissing out
ten pages a day. The bulk of the manuscript was castrated. I began<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>again. When I graduated Bradley 2005 the
draft resembled very little of the product I had intended it to be (note: you
should see the outakes in the WWII chest in my mom’s basement). I handed Dr.
Palakeel a 700 page<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>draft for my senior
project. I got hired on at the library full time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I fell in love with a classy girl who has lived
in Europe for the past six years and wrote her a love letter a day for over a
year. That autumn day when (with the help of Hale) still ranks as the best of
my life, even though we never fucked and I ended up in the hospital with what
could best be delineated as a metaphysical breakdown.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></o:p></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Somehow I kept writing and somehow the manuscript
continued to gain literary calories not to mention, in tandem with its author,
a robust beer belly. By autumn 2007 the manuscript was over a thousand pages, a
thousand pages that had been hemmed and hawed and bleed over, a total of
350,000 words.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The manuscript went on the backburner. I started
giving a shit ton of local poetry readings. I read my work on a local
avant-garde artsy radio station. I got fired from Bradley. I moved back in with
Uncle Mike, the house on Heading avenue, placing a writing desk in the woods,
the same woods that I had immortalized in <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>novel years earlier never having a clue that I
would be crashing in (Nate Lockwood's granpas) house one day.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"> </span></o:p></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I continued to write poems. I went to Hollywood and
performed at a cool bar with some of the most salient up-and-coming writers in
the country. I come back home where every writer in Peoria fucking hates me.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Such is the life of a writer. Such is the pleading, curdled
vagaries of time.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;"></span></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;"></span></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;"></span></span> </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;"> * * * * *</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: Times;"></span></span> </div>
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</div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">In the stately Stephen King throne christening my
every literary ambition, Yellow Monkey Bars and Unbidden Erection is my Dark
Tower. <a href="http://miredmusings.blogspot.com/2008/11/human-beings-came-and-went-epitaph-of.html" target="_blank">My Infinite Jest</a>. My Ulysses. My War and Peace, intrinsically, my life
work. I have lived with it for almost a third of my life, a joy surpassed only
by dual friendships Patrick (25 years) and Hale (27). The manuscript has served
as my rod and my staff, it has held me up in hard times, like my two friends
holding me up, refusing to allow my emotional mettle to succumb as I witnessed
the final stanza od breath echo from my own father’s body.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"> </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">The novel will be released on line close to it’s
current (somewhat addled, somewhat brilliant) incarnation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of the names will be changed cause I
don’t want to get sued, but rudiments, capturing the breath of our youth and
the vowels of our dreams (and West Peoria and failing and loving and giving)
remain the same.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">
</span><br />
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</div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><o:p></o:p></span> </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">
</span><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">I will publish a different fractal daily for (shit)
about the next 200 days. Sometime in DEC I’ll create a Facebook page but for
now, everyday, click on the link b’low and you’ll find your Christmas gift from
13 years ago unraveling itself like a Dungeons & Dragons avatar map. The
first 150 pages are almost completely autobiographical. Later on (as you know)
the majority is Fictitious as fuck.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">I’ll release a chronological ‘chapter’ every day
with a reference to pg #’s to the original. Sometime in June when the final
chapter is posted we will drink like there is no t’morrow.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">So happy holidays and thank you for years of
friendship and (in the immortal patois of Patrick ‘smarter than you)
McReynolds, “Life is short. Times are hard. Here’s your fucking Christmas
card.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"> Without further ado I give to you my heart, <a href="http://afailedcampaign.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">YELLOW MONKEY BARS & UNBIDDEN ERECTIONS-a failed campaign.</a></span></o:p></div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">I hope you enjoy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">In eternal brotherhood.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 107%;">DVB<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</span><br />
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David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-29281797954966579162013-12-04T09:31:00.000-08:002013-12-05T09:32:22.734-08:00Tuesday Dec 17th at the Tartan Inn<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg95N3vUPosX_5maOoAY2f7cVNMNQunuQCdo6CT7dRns1a5l2Jqd-phumeF-G0AtOEroHCK9WFORz2Ll4MOiMS540rCAhMSoORknridEJzu3IwIqroE1PJKpuIE5wr03cifmQLYRw/s1600/last555+333.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg95N3vUPosX_5maOoAY2f7cVNMNQunuQCdo6CT7dRns1a5l2Jqd-phumeF-G0AtOEroHCK9WFORz2Ll4MOiMS540rCAhMSoORknridEJzu3IwIqroE1PJKpuIE5wr03cifmQLYRw/s640/last555+333.jpg" width="497" /></a></div>
<br />David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-82607222159121137872013-11-27T01:01:00.000-08:002014-11-25T01:33:29.491-08:00 Thanksgiving poem of unalloyed gratitude and thnx (Inpsired by the first chapter of Marcus Aurelis' Mediatations) for those I love most in this cartoon comic strip bubble of reality (see b'low):<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnW9Ynt6ESjOB-q2MhNwsJQbJu-dDxoFFgd7OZHJ2Dm4s_xeDToiklWFCSUEkv-JmBzI1GeTXjSoZ6whlu1UwzBxGDEQ4H2GrvteJFw0t5YDJqTrnBlt8uvI7yahYsyfTO2RGjbw/s1600/THANKSGIVING.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnW9Ynt6ESjOB-q2MhNwsJQbJu-dDxoFFgd7OZHJ2Dm4s_xeDToiklWFCSUEkv-JmBzI1GeTXjSoZ6whlu1UwzBxGDEQ4H2GrvteJFw0t5YDJqTrnBlt8uvI7yahYsyfTO2RGjbw/s1600/THANKSGIVING.png" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><strong><span style="font-size: x-large;">Thanksgiving canticle of Gratitude &Joy…<o:p></o:p></span></strong></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I’m thankful for leather wristbands,
cool jewelry, my baja that comes replete with a hood<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And for my cowboy hat which I always
wear as I amble aimlessly into the woods<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m Thankful for religious freedom, gay
rights, scraping by to afford rent<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">and for a good cup of coffee, scattered
autumn leaves, Lutheran hymns and menial employment.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">For cigars, country music, hoppy
ale,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>St. Mary’s cemetery at dusk, the
calligraphic sight of a vacant tree bough,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And how this time of year the sight of a
barn or wayward corn husk still destroys me, even now.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">For soccer moms with short hair,
internet recipes, drivin’ through backroads the sun a splattering yolk<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And for the waterfalls at Mathieson state park,
Amazon dot com and for practical jokes.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">For getting a text from a distant friend,
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>going out and hearing live tunes,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And for celebrating BLOOMSDAY (with
copious vats of Guinness) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in the middle
of June<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">When the waning light settles much later
than on the silver November horizon, as if on a lark<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I’m thankful for ten mile runs through
the meadows of Bradley environs and for the Lagoon at Glen Oak Park.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For local art openings, open mic poetry
readings where we caterwaul and the audience shouts;<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">For late-night partying, chain smoking
and loose-loined women who gratuitously put out<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Drunk and Scratching, limbs spread akimbo as
if a wide Sargasso sea<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">For<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Sports Centers top ten<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and that I
witnessed (first hand) the glory of the Chicago Bulls dynasty. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">For health and good organs, my liver,
resilient, as if peeled from Prometheus when tethered to a rock.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">For French pressed coffee on Sunday
mornings, reading the New York times while listening (LOUD!) to JS Bach.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">For hot sauce, pomegranates, a slice of
cucumbers in Pimms cup, and for <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>grated
Colby jack cheese.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I’m Thankful for Moosehead, Denis
Johnson, and overdue ATM fees. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And for those philosophers I go back to,
even now more so<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Esp. Wittgenstein, Immanuel Levinas,
Battaile and Maurice Blanchot.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And for literature, Whitman is to autumn
as Chaucer/Boccaccio is to spring <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And for the searing intellect of<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Brianne</span>, Hollyee, Daz, Mileece and sexy Barbara Antoniazzi<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Books like White Noise, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>READERS BLOCK, The Sun Also Rises ( about a
wounded-war phallus)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I’m thankful for George Saunders, James
Joyce, Lorrie Moore and my mentor the late David Foster Wallace.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">For Robert A. Johnson whose book “We” is
the greatest mediation on romantic love that I have ever perused,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I’m thankful for the women who inspire
me to write, the obligatory poetic muse<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Timeless creations like Cheri Lee,
Valena Jackson,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Megan Sow and Arya
Badiyan<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And how nothing beats cookin’ homemade
sweet potato soup on Saturday night, smoking my pipe while listen’ to Prairie
Home Companion.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I’m thankful for TWIN PEAKS, for cheesy John Hughes 80’s
movies the Breakfast club, sixteen candles and Ferris Bueller<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And for cool neighbors, Melissa, Cliff,
Roger and (intellectually riveting) Samantha Mueller.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I’m thankful for my writing desk,
pummeling into the keyboard as if dueled-jousted into a fight<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I’m thankful for the way in which my
apartment catches the time-signature cradled in light<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Like a Vodka screwdriver, so orange as
if to be considered tangerine;<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I’m thankful for those I love who have
added meaning to my life, exponential human beings:<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>John
and Kelly whose wedding I severed my long wild man locks<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And even though Ozzie’s gone, I’ll
always be thankful for my eternal White Sox.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">For my cousin Larry who is a rockstar and
has been clean and sober now four years<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And even though I imbibe too frequently
I’m so thankful for a good cold beer.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I’m thankful for guy friends stuck
together like metaphysical epoxy<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Like Mcreynolds, Mike Nelson. Kyle and a
bad-ass writer, named Roxy</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjblAJtE2bNOoAyPlOSSpU7tGGlw7vrZ2rrv9m3iRNvaK3IPSJw1xCE2sUJQAFZYLIggvX1_kGYZNr99zJH1G8YHirPq_SnTfnK4hR-fcYf-NkHkuMjanaHamNPjwNMR6KQ-S38Aw/s1600/46507_888838194285_592330006_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjblAJtE2bNOoAyPlOSSpU7tGGlw7vrZ2rrv9m3iRNvaK3IPSJw1xCE2sUJQAFZYLIggvX1_kGYZNr99zJH1G8YHirPq_SnTfnK4hR-fcYf-NkHkuMjanaHamNPjwNMR6KQ-S38Aw/s1600/46507_888838194285_592330006_n.jpg" height="225" width="400" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span> </div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Grappled friends whose adoption tried,
quote Polonious, who would always be true<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Such as David Thompson, Duck Mccover, Jasna,
Diane Happ and Mark-Andrew<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Friends’ I’ve been blessed with whose
loyalty just has <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>never failed<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And how, après twenty-five year in my
life how thankful I am to still have my best friend david Hale<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I’m thankful for Mike, Jeremy, Claire,
Andrew Gary, Lil’ Phylica, all of whom now have passed on,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And how cool it always is to sit back
and have a few beers with Jacob Long<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Friends I love dearly,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>whose rapport will never be severed<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And that ( angelic-creature) six years
ago who simply gave me the “Best Thanksgiving ever.” <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I’m Thankful for late night writing jams
to Metallica <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>( oh where would we<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>be sans Lars???)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">This holiday especially I’m thankful for
the <a href="http://succulentsobriety.blogspot.com/2013/08/day-39-when-something-is-well-hidden-it.html" target="_blank">West Peoria dive Bars<o:p></o:p></a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times;"></span><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/tv44FUgmnuI?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Mike’s stand up which for years was stag
and served cold brew from an oak barrel cask<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Champs West where the poets’ congregate
to drink beer while songwriter’s carol, basking in <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Folk songs, while Gavra Lynn and Shannon
Moore will serve you twice and not wince<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">The (seedy) Getaway and Jimmy’s where
nothing beats drinking a Black and Tan compliments of good ol’ Vince.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And all the girls at the Tartan Inn who are
admittedly good lookin’<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Friday nights at the Owl’s Nest where
(everyone is family) you just can ‘t beat Joe’s cookin’.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">For my overtly overpriced college degree
ferried on laurels, impotent tassel <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>useful as burnt Halloween plastic-ring spiders,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And for those days I just want to watch
sports, drink cheap beer and eat (inane) amounts of White Castle Sliders<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/wcs0oEz4QSE?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And while<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it ended up heaped in frivolous streams of
plutocratic lies and political controversy <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I’m so blessed for the time I spent
teaching, reading, working and writing at Bradley University<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Who fired me claiming my prose was
fraught with obsessive allusions to ass and tits<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And how humbled I was when Natashia Deon
invited me to be a part of Dirty Laundry Lit<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Partying in Hollywood drinking a beer while
carousing down the noted Boulevard of noted Fame<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And God damn after twenty years how blessed I
feel to come into contact with the ravishing Sarah St. James,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Who touched my hand in a bookstore
aisle, presaging that a writer one day I would be,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I’m thankful for my readers’ and that
I’ve been granted the opportunity to entertain <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>my glorious souls such as cool Kristin, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>ravishing Suzette, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>numinous Brian,(can’t stop licking my husband)
Becky and my poetic brother Larry Bradley. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">For radiator heat, pissing hot showers,
a shave with lots of lather,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And even though he’s been gone now ten
years I’m so blessed that I got the opportunity to really know my father. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">I’m thankful<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>for artistic ambitions, wayfaring wishes and
dreams that perhaps will never come true,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And how the highlight of my life (baby)
was when I buckled my arms around yer waist and was granted the privilege<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>simply to park bench hold you.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">So this Black Friday while indulged in
the materialistic neon rash that is commercial living, <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Take time remember that it is not only
the thanks, it is also the giving<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">To something greater than ones
individual (intellectual) druthers<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">And to know somehow that its not about
you, but it’s about “The Other”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Emptying<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>the interior of ones chest dry while asking for no return<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Like Kerouac’s Roman candles, “the only
people for me are the mad one’s who deeply burn burn burn!!!”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><strong>So happy holidays to those people who always inspire<o:p></o:p></strong></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><strong>
<u1:p></u1:p>
</strong></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><strong>Me to write every day, you are the forever flicker in my</strong> <strong>creative fire…</strong></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><strong></strong></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><strong><o:p></o:p></strong></span> </div>
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<o:p></o:p> </div>
David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-39456231483788797162013-11-23T00:00:00.000-08:002013-11-23T00:11:57.455-08:00Heading Avenue Symphony--4th movement; 2000<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY5QBhkjAeXuSSXLpCvHkaH00_PtHRpMaQkTPtSb4cKPPr2iyV3UI6Lbdj-yT1HOlX6qtriQrPHKihWj5K0czhq-xrsbsepl13dxOn4dlkKvbEppuDpXVQvp1B3lEAm3sLMW_XlA/s1600/peoria-skyline-night-flickr-wizard298.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY5QBhkjAeXuSSXLpCvHkaH00_PtHRpMaQkTPtSb4cKPPr2iyV3UI6Lbdj-yT1HOlX6qtriQrPHKihWj5K0czhq-xrsbsepl13dxOn4dlkKvbEppuDpXVQvp1B3lEAm3sLMW_XlA/s640/peoria-skyline-night-flickr-wizard298.jpg" height="424" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
You are twenty-three years old, half drunk, and you find yourself running down Heading Avenue at four-thirty in the morning. You have sloppily sauntered around Peroria all night searching. Your friend was supposed to be home but no one answers his door. You tried sleeping outside for an hour, using your book bag as a pillow. You have twelve pages of a <a href="http://afailedcampaign.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">novel,</a> a work in progress tucked inside your book bag.<br />
<br />
You are so damn proud of those first twelve pages.<br />
<br />
It is late October 2000 and you are running. Your limbs are flailing, circulating, gyrating. You can feel sweat; little beads of bourbon begin to accrue on the top of your brow, lining up the way football defensive men line up at the line of scrimmage prior to the hike.<br />
<br />
You find yourself running, thinking about her. Your entire body is pedaling. Every muscle tucked beneath your flesh is exerting a commanding forward presence. You pass the flower shop and the cemetery and for a moment, beneath the hushed dim glower of the arched streetlamp you see your shadow, an elongated fabric of joints that seems to spindle and bulge into a quavering blanket before it vanishes, between streetlamps, between increments, between silences and botched years. Between trying so adamantly hard to become that person, that individual, that man that you feel should be.<br />
<br />
And you are running, sprinting. You've spent the entire night downtown, combing the hard sidewalk avenues named after dead presidents, seeking her face. On the corner of Adam's and Jefferson, across the street from the police station, a middle-aged man with a waterfall mullet and a jean jacket with his collar up-turned accosts you and inquires if you would like to "fool around."<br />
<br />
You ignore him and continue to walk. Your ebryonic novel, all twelve single-space pages heavily fonted pages (the longest script you have ever written) is tucked under your arm like a flag after a military ceremony. You walk continue to walk You are looking for her. In between the snycopated-electronic din and butterfly flutter of strobe lights, between dank bars with tufts of cigarette smoke levitating into the ceiling; couples rhymatically biting each others torso, groping on the dancefloor, between old men hunched over the barstool like wooden question marks, dribbling beer off their cidert chins when they talk about their ex-wives; between all of this, you are seeking the outlines of her perfect face.<br />
<br />
You run into Jenane and her girlfriend Jen inside a dyke bar. An aged Queen wearing mascera and pantyhose and talking with her wrist offers to give you a ride across town and for some reason you accept. You get into the vehicle with her and she begins to sob as she tells you about her childhood. She parks in front of a fire hydrant facing the opposite direction on a One Way street. She removes a bag of weed and begins to roll a blunt. You are in a neighborhood you have never seen before. You hear the cackle and authoratative squeal of a cop car zip past. The Queen holds out the blunt in front of you like she is at the make-up counter. She tells you not to worry. She calls you honey. She tells you that she used to work this section of town and that the cops know her, honey. You want to leave but you don't want to offend her. In a way she seems just like you. All alone in an overpopulated planet trying to find her identity. All alone with no one left to hold.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
It is the year 2000. Things have not changed too much. Things have changed completely. You are a student, an internet adress, a bobbling Christian, a cavalier drunk, a lover, a philosopher, a writer. You are a human being. You are nine digits and three slashes on your blue social security card. You are sinner. An american, A world traveler. You are a citizen, a dilletante, you are in debt. You are an employee, a boyfriend, a bastard. You are the digits on your discover card, the digits on a cell phone number. You are a person who wants to change the world. A person who wants to be remembered after your remains are pocketed in a seven foot casket and planted into a fresh slant of earth.<br />
<br />
You are arrogant. You are a smoker. You are a dickhead. You hurt people sometimes. Six months ago, when you found out that the love of your life was boning the roommate across the hall, you ran a red light and was broadsided by a cement truck. You should have been killed. Glass splattered all around your upper chest and forehead coating your upper frame with a chandelier bib. You were taken to the same hospital where you stayed at a week before you graduated from High school. It would be the same hospital where, in less than two years, you will watch life slowly drip away from the lids of your father's eyes.<br />
<br />
You are lonely. You are searching. You are complicated. You are curious. You want to experience everything. You want to read everything. Drink everything. Smoke everything. Kiss everything.<br />
<br />
You study Hinduism. You drink lots of coffee. You read Carl Jung. You worship James Joyce. You want to write a novel like Ulysses. You want to precisely capture what it feels like to be a human being in an age where everyting is marketed; where every covert kiss becomes a global commodity.<br />
<br />
You get pissed off with your parents when they talk about their son like he has no future.<br />
<br />
You work third shift. You entertain people. You hang out with bohemians. Your best friend, the one who isn't home, is a folk singer. You think his song "Merry Monday Happenstance" seriously rivals Bob Dylans best work.<br />
<br />
Tonight you want to see your girlfriend. You want to see Brook. You want to see your own face in her eyes a second before she blinks and smiles.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
After the car accident the love of your life, the one who left you for her roommate comes into the library and gives you an embrace. For a second you hold each other like lovers. For a terse moment you hold each other like you are one teething creature. You like the way her skin feels around your skin. You like the way her mouth contorts when she says your name. You still haven't had that talk indicative of closure.<br />
<br />
She comes in the next day with a VON MAUER bag. She has it adeptly packed. Inside there is the quilt you wreathed around her shoulders the last time you kissed her goodbye in your old apartment. There are old videos and old shirts. The variegated autumn-colored sweater; the shirt you were wearing the day you kidnapped her from Creative Writing class. She is wearing her new boyfriend's jacket.<br />
<br />
Everything you have ever given her, she is giving back to you.<br />
<br />
You have almost died but it hardly seemed to matter. You seem to have felt already dead and draft cold for quite sometime now.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
It is late October 2000. Either Armageddon or Jesus was supposed to accompany Y2K. The bookstore where you worked at for four Christmasses closed in early January. The Yanakee's beat the Mets in the Subway series. A vote for Nadar is a vote for Bush. Napster is a no-no. The World Trade Towers still salute the New York skyline. 9-11 is only something you call in an emergency.<br />
<br />
Boy bands and glitter are seemingly sprinkled everywhere.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
The night of your father's death two years later, your mother will tell you that she was grateful she still had two weeks with your father after he was diagnosed.<br />
<br />
"Those people in the World Trade Towers never had a chance to say goodbye." Mom says. The room is white and circled with tears.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
After your accident your mother filled out an application for you to leave. You find yourself in Normal, Illinois. Inside Manchester. None of your previous classes appear to have transferred.<br />
<br />
*<br />
<br />
You are running. Sprinting. Heading Avenue is a runway for your spirit; an emotional launchpad blasting your anchored spirit into the atmosphere of your dreams. Your mother works at the end of the street, in the catholic orphanage. 100 meters from where Brook lives. The nights you stay at Brook's apartment you park your station wagon four blocks over, in a different manor, so not to alarm your mother when she arrives to work in the morning. Your last night in Peoria before you left the two of you went dancing. You found her body flailed around your limbs at the Red Foxx Den, in between shots of single malts, Boys with short haircut and manicured smiles flame in front of you telling you how gorgeous the two of you look together for a straight couple.<br />
<br />
On the dance floor her innate poisonous rythmic sway finds your animal rythm. Her movements find your movements. Your body is pressed up into her body and your lips and tongue find solace in her breath. When the two of you stumble out of the bar and get into her convertable you tell her "fuck it." You tell her that this is what you want. You want what you have next to you right here. Even though she is ten years older than you are. Even though she has more baggage than an international terminal at O'hare, you the want the girl with the velvet hair and smooth forehead and gemnii constelation smile. You want the girl, the woman, who stopped you after class and invited you out for Guiness. The woman who is ten years older than you are, the woman who is sheerly academic, who is the subtle clack of rushed heels stirring in the jaundice hallways of Bradley Hall.<br />
<br />
This is what you want. You think that you are sure of it this time.<br />
<br />
You get down on one knee and tell her this and swear to her that you will be there for her no matter what, swear that you will protect her, swear that she is the most important thing in your life right now.<br />
<br />
Brook bats her eyes like she is changing the channel when you ask her to marry you.<br />
<br />
"Do you realize that you just propsoed to a married woman?<br />
<br />
Your ears register the gnawing bark of her huskie when she answers the door. She seems nonplussed that you are here. You want to ask her the status of her dwindling marriage. If her husband is considering moving back in after all. You want to ask her about the "other man." She is wearing your old Pearl Jam t-shirt and panties. She invites you inside and sleepily invites you back into her matress and when you try to hold her your body titters and cowers and shakes and you tell her that you can't. The thing you have sprinted towards is in you arms and you have never felt more lonely. Never felt more disparate and empty than you do right now at this moment.<br />
<br />
This is how you fall asleep. Your body spooning her body and then shaking and then holding her and freezing.<br />
<br />
"If you don't like what we are then why did you come back to me." She says.<br />
<br />
"Because you were the only thing inisde my chest I could hold and believe in." You say, only it sounds differently when it escapes your lips. It sounds like a tear.<br />
<br />
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It is late October 2000. You are twenty-three years old. Nothin' changed brother.</div>
<br />David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-16845172206192758662013-11-22T00:00:00.000-08:002013-11-22T00:44:45.709-08:00Or Lose it in the Sun... Heading Avenue Symphony; third movement...1996 <br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx2DeYWB3_kTcmUZYTL-HtIjqfmjQCMBbr2IxTkVBDrnKBXTaS_iXHZtgyqHf-OWFPHcxN11yrGSmHAetLt3LnPcfzjHEZ9PvW9SD5kdL2Pbt12UPbK3zaqlmrUEOfdprBt63bNw/s1600/1+kr.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgx2DeYWB3_kTcmUZYTL-HtIjqfmjQCMBbr2IxTkVBDrnKBXTaS_iXHZtgyqHf-OWFPHcxN11yrGSmHAetLt3LnPcfzjHEZ9PvW9SD5kdL2Pbt12UPbK3zaqlmrUEOfdprBt63bNw/s1600/1+kr.png" height="400" width="260" /></a><br />
<br />
It is 1996 and you are all alone. You find yourself fueled by copious amounts of caffeine, flickering cigarette's into an ash tray, staring out through a windex-tinted translucent reflection of yourself across the desert of the dashboard. The velocity and confusion of youth has manifested itself in front of the toll-booths of adulthood. You grasp the wheel so tightly that your knuckles seem to crack free from your tenacious grapple as you harness the curved reins of the wheel. Your hair is cut short and stylishly gelled. Your girlfriend Kristina is in the passenger seat next to you, smoothing out the bottom hem of her denim skirt with her smooth palms that look like twin doves. You have just graduated from High school, spending the last week of secondary education tucked into a hospital bed in Methodist Medical Center; plastic tubes threaded through your supine posture, offering your enervated, dehydrated late-teenage body nourishments. <br />
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<br />
High school was an emotional-taxing four year sty that swelled and inhaled and eventually festered, spreading juvenile puss on a four year period that you have successfully blocked from your memory. Like most people you admire, you never found your niche in high school. The school you attended had the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the country you live in and the lowest standardized test scores in the state that issued you your Drivers license. You got in trouble for writing an article about a teacher who manipulated grades for athletes. You got praised for publishing a poem on a teacher who died; an old aged English teacher who accused you of plagiarism sixth months before his death. You got lonely and depressed. You listened to more Morrissey than is both humanly sane and salubrious. Your parents tell you to do what their notion of God wants you to do and then they ferry your siblings across state to compete in musical competitions. Your GPA bobbled and dipped your senior year. Once an athlete you quit running altogether your senior year to work on writing, but mostly found yourself bussing tables and discussing your foibles in front of a Christian psychiatrist who's been telling you since sophomore year that "you have a bad case of senioritis." <br />
<br />
You battled an emotional incubus, an empty academy and searched for meaning, scribbling out ink-chipped stanzas of poems, reading everything, imbiding any libations sealed in bottles that scream of non-mathematical proofs. You quadruple your valium intake and wake up days later, the word <em>POET </em>vertically carved into your chest, a broken bottle of Jack Daniels shattered around your bathroom floor; shiny shards of glass that look like diamonds strewn around your lap and shoulders like crystallized New Years confetti. <br />
<br />
But that is in the past. That is sealed. Two days after you are released from the angelic white sheen of the hospital-wing you don cap and gown and find yourself surrounded by strangers. When you receive your diploma the principal (the one who edited your articles for the school paper; the one who impregnated a student teacher) gives you a hug. <br />
<br />
But now you are free. You are emancipated. You are reading Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and you can feel your thoughts stretch out heavily in front of you, like the strip of road you plough your vehicle across; like that bullet-hole sunset you strive inside for. You are nineteen years old and your body procreates creative thoughts; your body produces exertion; your body aches to not be tethered to the past, to that hollow place you have just escaped from, that place you will never go back to again. <br />
<br />
Every muscle in your body has an impulse to action, you think, as you adjust the nub on the tape deck, grope the clutch and breeze off into the orange shafts of light. Every muscle inside of you body has a purpose. Every thought that fleetingly tugs at the creative reels and pulleys inside your skull has a significance; has an predestined place reserved in the orchestrated diagram of the inscrutable cosmos. <br />
<br />
The world has changed since your freshman year--each year of high school contained a decade worth of personal growth and self-actulaization in themselves. Buildings are being "wired" connected; the elusive stream of invisible traffic has formed a global goassamer known as the world wide web. A staticky yawn like morning breath grouses from the top of the modem when agitated. What once was Alternative rock is now mainstream commercial fizzle. Coffee stands are everywhere. Human beings are seemingly engrossed in a rushed string of motion. Life is one bussiness transaction. A receipt sloppily printed out for a rash, unexpected purchase for an item that no longer fits. <br />
<br />
You work. You stock empty shelves at Barnes and Noble. You get phone numbers of females with their i's doted in little hearts. You make car payments. Fish out rent. Hook up the occasional bag of veggies. <br />
<br />
You attend classes at the local community college, where you feel ashamed to have gone, mostly because it seemed that your parents, who never really took an interest in your own endeavors, are now completely divorced from your dreams. <br />
<br />
Your write. You study your ass off. You dream of leaving. Leaving and not returning ever again to that place you have already left. <br />
<br />
Then one day, in mid October, you leave and everything you have leaves with you. There is the napsack with the poems and images. There are three shirts and two pairs of jeans. There are socks punched into a tight white fist and boxers and a vial of JOOP. There are four packs of cigarettes and there is the impetus to fly. There is the impetus to see the bald spot on the ground where you are currently standing. <br />
<br />
You find yourself at O'Hare and you find yourself boarding a plane with her head heavily sifting inside your chest. You find yourself flipping open the plastic drapes for miles above surface and watching as the winged vessel leaves; abandons everything you have ever known. Jettisons every background set you are all to familiar with. <br />
<br />
The sound of an airplane is the sound of sex. It is the heavy aerial-gruff of mankinds technological procreation. The swift still-life strokes. The feeling of anxiety. The feeling of being wedged in a heated aisle with total strangers. The feeling of being above and knowing you could die. The feeling of putting trust in the palms of a navigator whom you have never met. And the landing when you wake up in that golden place, exhausted, adjusting the plastic limbs, peering out only to see her reflection. Only to see her--the person whom you have abandoned all categories of logic to meet; that person whom you have come to see once again, that person who will add meaning to your life...you see that person know, behind a giant tint window and from where you see her she appears golden. Like her smile could generate an entire thermonuclear planetary systems that orbit around her unblemished countenance. <br />
<br />
You read her <a href="http://whattheheartisandwhatitfeels.blogspot.com/2013/10/oct-19th-1996-exactly-17-years-ago.html" target="_blank">poems</a>. You meet her parents. You take pictures. You show her pictures of your family and ex-girlfriend. You sit under a golden tree next to a pond and read Rumi. You feel her body gravitate towards your body and then slowly slip away. <br />
<br />
She shows you a picture of her boyfriend who lives in Minnesota. She plays songs for you on the piano. She tells you that it would never work out between you. That you went out to find her for all the wrong reasons. That you went to this place wielding too much expectations. <br />
<br />
Then see tells you to kiss her every part of her. <br />
<br />
Then you leave. <br />
<br />
She stands in line next to you at the airport. Stands next to you. When you embrace her before you get on the plane there is no kiss. There is only a slight tug; the paws of a child yanking the unsuspecting pant leg of their guardian. <br />
<br />
Back on the plane your body falls apart in tears. You find out only later that she left without watching your plane slowly skirt of from the runway. She had a prior appointment. <br />
<br />
Your heart is a loose brick that has just broken off some place inside your chest; someplace inside of you that you never realized totally existed until now. <br />
<br />
You will find her again at a moment when you least expect it. <br />
<br />
You will find yourself, in a moment you least expect. <br />
<br />
It is autumn, 1996, you are all alone. You vote for Bob Dole because both of your parents are registered Republicans, mostly because of abortion. When you arrive back home you find another job at another book store, just in time for the holiday rush. <br />
<br />
You walk out to the courtyard of the mall where you work during your lunchbreak. You watch all the old people walk very fast. They seem to be doing laps around the mall. They wear cheap rockports and pants that come up to their chin. Some have bee-hive hairdo's seemingly constructed from bolls of cotton. You watch as the old people navigate their collective years around the courtyard of the commercial mecca where you are employed and you wonder to yourself "Is this all? Is this all that life has to offer?" <br />
<br />
They have hard-candy flavored foreheads bearing cardboard wrinkles and they continue to orbit your thoughts like plastic ducks in a childhood swimming pool. They continue to walk around the center court of the mall. They move their limbs and huff their gait until eventually one day death plucks them; fingers them off of this corporeal carousel. They walk until finally, there are no more hard tiles to strut across and no more shops where they can exchange their rash purchases. <br />
<br />
It is 1996 and you've been dreaming cognitively for almost two decades. <br />
<br />
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David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7018055.post-50754754742634552652013-11-21T23:52:00.002-08:002013-11-22T00:23:00.511-08:00Heading Avenue Symphonic Cycle--Second Movement- 1992, still-life second person sonata<br />
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<br />
It is autumn 1992 and the world is opening up. You slumber out of your bed at 4:30 am every morning, streaking down a.m. arteries of Moss and Sherman Avenues in sweatpants and sneakers, inserting inky headlines into the unsuspecting sleepy screendoor hinges shielding neighborhood door knobs, beneath the pre-dawn buzz and insect whorl of glowering street lights. A bloodshot sun reminiscent of the Japanese flag lumbers heavily in the East and you find yourself toating a brick-heavy backpack across the ammonia-scented tiles of Manual high school, in the south side of Peoria. You stand in front of an faceless jambed sentinel and finger a combination near where his navel might be located. The nasal harsh shrill of the tardy bell escorts flocks of flannel-shirted students into wooden doors. Your day commences early with p.e, followed by algebra, Coach Mannioni's World History (which you excel at), Slacker Thomas's Biology where the acidic and ill smell of formaldehyde is never far from your nostrils. Your favorite class is English, where rubicund-faced Mister Reents (who rumor has it is gay) plays classical music, jazz and opera and brews coffee and sits on the front of his desk jiggling his legs, smiling, relating the antics of Edith Hamilton and classical greek mythology to the pending '92 election, where Ross Perot has just re-entered the race. <br />
<br />
Your afternoon consists of one study hall and one French class. You scale the hallways between classes, your shadow looming amidst a sea of bodies and clicks and swirled dialects. You smell the faces of the popular girls, their hair long in back and sprayed into a crimped bow above their foreheads. Their bodies attired in short-skirted cheerleading uniforms on the Friday of football games. They huddle in an amoebic mass, floating, nonchalantly, pass homecoming banners and no-names, into the fleeting confetti of juvenile identity. <br />
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjC_HvZ8y0UzA6wAmPGjMeqp50y1zDCA4p5PUqwrxOZC3OLRhaIKkzwbDNy3F3Gm3gbueQSC5SdF5ELkNzn_duU8CqfpMjI0D3baLuYnLLxVzJXWKRar5B40dQpDfFELkMy6bsG/s1600/ricca2.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjC_HvZ8y0UzA6wAmPGjMeqp50y1zDCA4p5PUqwrxOZC3OLRhaIKkzwbDNy3F3Gm3gbueQSC5SdF5ELkNzn_duU8CqfpMjI0D3baLuYnLLxVzJXWKRar5B40dQpDfFELkMy6bsG/s1600/ricca2.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a>The day begins for you at two twenty-five, after your palette has skipped through a verbal-swoop of French conjugates, the final bell of the day alarms your body into motion. You find yourself in the heavy-sour athletic stench of the locker room. You peel off your jeans and unbutton your shirt, conscious not to look at your fellow unclothed athletes, less you be labeled a "fag," although it's hard for you not to stare with open lips the first time you see Joe Lontippi naked. He was born in Europe and is uncircumcised. It looks like there is a deformed clamp dangling between his thighs and for a minute you consider pulling him aside and inquiring if he realizes that his body possesses such a deformity, naive that he uses his gentalia as an optical magnet at the age of sixteen. <br />
<br />
The heavy prattle and towel thwaps echo deeply in the din of the lockerroom. There is boisterous chatter about girls. Which cheerleader puts out. Which cheerleaders parents are never home. You step into your shorts and lace your sneakers into double-loops and jump and stretch. You are an athlete, a runner. Last year as an eighth grader you clocked the second fastest mile time for your age category in the state of Illinois, skidding just above the elusive five-minute mile barrier. Now, as a Freshman in high school, you already are the second fastest on a varsity squad consisting of mainly Hispanic and African-American athletes. They give you shit about your age. They tease you about being a virgin. But overall, they give you long-complicated "gangsta" handshakes at the finish line. <br />
<br />
<br />
You wait for Joe Lontippi, the other white boy, to suit up and the two of you gallop your limbs into a steady jog, gliding behind the football field and the abandoned baseball dugout. With your elbows and forearms indented into geometrical right angles, the two of you mount the "HILL" that separates social and economic classes, arriving at Madison Golf course, where <a href="http://miredmusings.blogspot.com/2007/07/requiem-for-coach-pt-2_22.html" target="_blank">Coach Ricca</a> awaits, along with Jose Munoz, team captain, Randy Peacock; gang-bangers Quaynar Thomas, Leatric Spires and Gabino Martinez. Many of the athletes are on work-study so they get off early in the afternoon. Only yourself and Lontippi will later attend college. <br />
<br />
Gabino smiles and makes vulgar gestures during squats. He dates Corinne, a girl who just graduated with you from junior high three months ago. In another month 'Beano will leave her when she tells him that she is five months pregnant, claiming that the child isn't his. <br />
<br />
The group of athletes kick down Sterling Avenue, onto Heading, where Coach has instructed the boys into 800 meter drills. They do seven rotation. They sprint in a single-file locomotive burst. Each rotation a different member of the team leads and each rotation is expected to get faster and faster until the last one is an all-out ass-surge. Joe Lontippi leads first, followed by 'Beano. You lead the sixth of seven and by the time your rotation has arrived strips of sweat coat your forehead and back like a shower curtain. <br />
<br />
Coach Ricca has just pressed the pause button on the timer. The electronic lashes blink 2:05. The team is worn out. Leg and calf muscles are beginning to gradually stiff. Beano and Laetric fall over at their waist and inhale thick tufts of the early autumnal atmosphere. The group forms a pyramid near St. Josephs grave yard, where two green-tents are pitched in the cememtary today. Across the street is a flower shop, the same flower shop where last summer, you stopped in and purchased a rose of Dawn-Michelle, your girlfriend. <br />
<br />
Dawn-Michelle was a reigning State Speech champion. She was a senior and attended Richwoods High, by far the most opulent and academic-oriented of the four public high schools in Peoria. You met Dawn last summer, doing community theatre. You had the part of Charlie the anvil salesman in THE MUSIC MAN. Dawn was involved behind the scenes, doing make-up. The first time you sat in front of her blonde hair her entire face squinted in a puzzle. <br />
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<br />
<br />
"You know who you look like?" She said, to your dismay. <br />
<br />
"Who?" <br />
<br />
"That guy off of Blossom. Not Joey Lawrence. The other guy. Blossom's older brother. The alcoholic." <br />
<br />
<br />
You look back at her wondering what she has just smoked. It's not been the first time someone has made this comparison. Later in the year in Chicago, when a "fan" accosts you on State, you will learn to smile and say "Thanks for watching." But for now, your attention has averted totally to the short haired blond who wears cool hats and pantyhose underneath her jean shorts. She listens to the Cure and Concrete Blond and only dances at Stage Two when they have retro night and play "Just Can't Get Enough" by Depeche Mode. She sounds like a harp every time she speaks; the acoustic of her mouth rivaling that of a European concert hall. <br />
<br />
"Ready," You look at Jose and Joe and Justin on Heading Avenue. It is your turn to step ahead of the locomotive burst. It is your turn to lead. <br />
<br />
Looking back, you think the early 90's was the greatest time ever for music in your life. In the summer of 1992, Nirvana's Nevermind, Pearl Jam's Ten, U2's Auctung Baby, GNR's Use Your Illusion's and Metallica's "Black" album were each under a year old. You have a copy of a little known pianist named Tori Amos album called "Little Earthquakes" in your CD player and feel emotional riveted and sentimentally flushed everytime you listen to a song called "Winter." You first bonded with Dawn Michelle with enya's "Shepard Moons" tingling falsetto organic chimes in the background. <br />
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<br />
<br />
"She has the most beautiful voice," Dawn Michelle said to you, in between button kisses at Nortwoods Mall. <br />
<br />
* <br />
<br />
Your play was directed by a feisty, smooth skin African-angel named Pam. Pam never called you David. She only knew you as Charlie, the part you played on stage. <br />
<br />
"CHARLIE." Pam would screech. "Sugah, baby. You've gotta give the audience a lil' sugah. Give 'em a little something sweet!" <br />
<br />
Pam never disses you when you stutter across your lines. She never chides you. She encourages you to be crazy. She encourages you to let loose. In the big scene where Marilyn, the Madame Librarian flirts and kisses you so that the antagonistic Charlie doesn't sully and trump the antics of Harold Hill, the musical's hero, Pam interrupts you on the dress rehearsal. <br />
<br />
"Cut!!!!" She screams. "Charlie. QUIT LOOKING AT HER BUTT!!!!!" <br />
<br />
The cast and company immediately erupts in sprinkled giggles. <br />
<br />
"But I'm suppose to be checking her out." You say, very honestly, propping up the scrolled annotated script from your back pocket and pointing. There is more laughter. <br />
<br />
"Yes," Pam cackles. "Your absolutely right. If this was a solely adult production it would be different. But this is a CHILDREN's production and the park district might not be too happy if we're portraying leerers and oglers on stage." <br />
<br />
More laughter. You remember the meeting when rehearsals were going late. The set seemed to be crumpling. Before you met Dawn Michelle you were in love Amanda Haste who was grounded for staying out late in a parked Chevy driven by Harold Hill himself. <br />
<br />
"Why do people come to the theatre?" Pam asks the question. There is a gravid pause. The husked-dusty smell backstage props mingles with the intermittent still-life buzz of stage lights. There is silence. <br />
<br />
"People come to the theatre to escape." She says. " You all might not realize it now, and I hope you never fully do, but it's a HARD world out there. A hard world. People come tot the theatre to be entertained and to escape. Escape the harsh drudgery and sadness of their lives." <br />
<br />
Pam says, before going over notes, not realizing that she has formed what will later in life be your literary aesthetic. <br />
<br />
That summer Pam instructed a poetry class at the high school where you will attend earlier in the fall. The high school where you are expected to be a top athlete. Ironically, Dawn Michelle was in that poetry class. <br />
<br />
"Poetry, I hate poetry." You say. "Hate everything about it." <br />
<br />
"Someday you might not say that," Dawn says to you, pushing up her glasses as she thumbs through a copy of Leaves Of Grass." <br />
<br />
"Let me see that," You say, snatching the tattered sleeves away from her light grasp. You adjust your voice to a high-pitch squeal and begin to read." <br />
<br />
"<em>I celebrate myself and sing myself,</em> <br />
<em>And what I assume you must assume</em> <br />
<em>That every atom belonging to me</em> <br />
<em>as good belongs to you."</em> <br />
<br />
<em></em><br />
"Don't you feel it?" Dawn Michelle tells you. "Don't you feel what the poet is trying to say to you. Can't you hear it in his voice what the poet is trying to say to you; to your soul?" <br />
<br />
Being a smart-ass, you lift the collected volume of Whitman's life works to your left earlobes and pretend to be listening attentively. <br />
<br />
"What the hell are you doing?" Dawn says. <br />
<br />
"Shhhhhhh." You respond back to her in a whisper, your ear pressed against the tome. "I'm trying to listen to the poet speaking to my soul." <br />
<br />
"Give me that," Dawn says, snatching the book from the side of your face before she swats the book in your direction. <br />
<br />
"You men have no culture whatsoever." <br />
<br />
"What's that honey," You say, as she flaps the book open. "I was just going over baseball stats in my head." <br />
<br />
"Pmfdffffff." Is Dawn's reply, wiggling her chin in contempt. <br />
<br />
* <br />
<br />
Coach Ricca sets the timer and presses the plastic nub. It is your turn to lead the runners down Heading Avenue. The group bunches up close. As was expected, Peacock ran the last rotation too fast and the troops are exhausted. <br />
<br />
"Suck it up boy!" Leatric yells from behind. " Man, suck that shit up." <br />
<br />
At the corner of Heading and Waverly, Beano and Quaynar begin to drag behind followed closely by Poynter. The men are slowly being sliced apart from the boys. <br />
<br />
"Fifty-seven" Poynter yells out, reaffirming the 400 split before falling behind even more. You lead the group in a steady gallop. Munoz and Peacock seem to be riding your shoulders. Lontippi lags not far behind. <br />
<br />
"Come on, bro. " Munoz says. "Suck it up." <br />
<br />
The world around you, that golden habitual place where you have spent fourteen previous autumns elevates past you in a tugged blur. You can feel your chest and lungs begin to burn. Your limbs continue to excel, continue to thrust. <br />
<br />
"Almost there yo!" Peacock hammers out. Lontippi lags further back. You can feel Jose, the team captain, continue to push. <br />
<br />
"Don't worry about the split just focus on running through the finish line. Just focus on breaking through that." <br />
<br />
At the corner of Heading and Sterling there is a gated fence of a house you will one day live inside of and there is Coach Ricca, blinking at a timer in his palm. With forty meters less it is just yourself and Jose, stretching out the legs, headed through the finish line." <br />
<br />
"Damn." Coach said, clicking the top of the stop watch with his thumb. "You really butchered that split, didn't you." <br />
<br />
"The harder I train, the better I run coach." You say not looking your coach directly in the face before hawking and then allowing a loogie to fly. You see the tail end of your fellow teammates scrabble across the finish line. Beano is last, walking, holding his side claiming to have a cramp. <br />
There is a hard slap on your sweaty back. It is Jose. He is up next, It is his turn to lead. <br />
<br />
"One more gentleman." The coach says, clearing the digits on his stop watch. "Just one more round and then we can all go home." <br />
<br />
"And do what, Coach" Quaynar says, " Die in our sleep?" <br />
<br />
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* <br />
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<br />
<br />
About an hour before the first production of Music Man Pam shepherds the entire cast and chorus (about seventy kids, ages 8-19) into a giant circle backstage. <br />
<br />
"Now is time for us all to take a deep breath and just relax. " Pam says. Everyone in the circle grasp hands and squeezes. <br />
<br />
"Clear your mind." says Pam. "Clear out everything that's in your mind and just focus and relax." Pam says, her eyed welded shut. See seems to be breathing on a very metronmic caliber. <br />
<br />
There is silence. The entire cast of your production looks like a crop circle from overhead. You are flanked between mayor Shinn and a Townsperson and the next thing you know Pam is praying. <br />
<br />
"Hello God." Pam says, with her brown eyes still melted into their respected sockets. She prays. She asks God "The fingertips guiding the artist's touch." <br />
<br />
"No matter what denomination you are from. No matter where you are on the planet. No matter what you have been through or what name you address it--everyone, at some point in their lives, believes in a greater being. In a force greater than themselves as individuals. To this force we pray." <br />
<br />
Pam continues to pray. He face glows. there is an electric current that swooshed between the clasped limbs of the cast and the chorus. <br />
<br />
The first night of the play went smoothly and we received a standing ovation. The next day all the kids formed a circle but were not allowed to pray. Word had gotton around via a 'concerened' parent and protestant mother called and complained that she didn't want any New Age crap to interfere with her child's notion of faith. <br />
<br />
That was the last year ever Pam conducted the summer musical for Children's Community Theatre. <br />
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* <br />
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<br />
<br />
As you get older you realize that Peoria is the type of town that slowly masticates dreams prior to swallowing youthful ambitions. Two weeks after coach lines you up on Heading Avenue Jose, your team captain, would be kicked off the team and would later drop out of school. <br />
<br />
"I gotts myself a family," He says. "My girls pregnant. I gots to work, yo." <br />
<br />
Slowly your teammates would gradually dissipate. A ziplock bacg of cocaine would be found in Quaynar's locker; Peacock would get in trouble after school for slapping a kid with the bill of their baseball cap switched to the wrong direction. At the end, only you and Lontippi, the kid with the fleshy anchor between his legs, would be the only to members left from the original squad. <br />
<br />
At the end of the season, Lontippi comes up to you and shakes you hand. <br />
<br />
"You know Dave," He says, in his towel. "Even though a lot of shit has happened and we didn't make it as far as we thought we would as a team this year and everything, it still hasn't been that bad. The two of us still have had a pretty good season." <br />
<br />
"Yes," You say, nodding your head one time in an empty locker room that smells like old socks. <br />
<br />
"It hasn't been that bad at all." <br />
<br />
It is autumn 1992 and you are fifteen years of age. <br />
<br />
<object width="320" height="266" class="BLOGGER-youtube-video" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" data-thumbnail-src="http://img.youtube.com/vi/_6FBfAQ-NDE/0.jpg"><param name="movie" value="http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/_6FBfAQ-NDE&source=uds" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF" /><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><embed width="320" height="266" src="http://youtube.googleapis.com/v/_6FBfAQ-NDE&source=uds" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object>David Von Behrenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02867184248060411772noreply@blogger.com1