It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Best Experienced With:          Jesus & Mary Chain;       Here Comes Alice

(Please right click on the link below to open the suggested music to this evening’s treatise in a new browser window.   Clearly the winner in the 2010 Pirate’s Alley Faux Faulkner contest, this was written in less than four minutes on takeoff from PDX this evening.  Eat your heart out Mr. Faulker.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FBPZ18eRkc

He sits alone in the corner of the bar, a Camel filterless cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth like a night crawler dangles from the hook of a ten pound test line at the end of a bamboo fishing pole at a Mississippi mud hole in the stinking July heat.  She caught his eye briefly while gliding silently and effortlessly through the raucous, sweaty throng of New Zealand rugby players, apperaing to levitate over their heads like a pregnant monarch butterfly floats over fields of Iowa corn on that perfect June day when school children leap off their respective busses, racing towards their ramshackle farm homes, screaming “no more teachers, no more books, no more of teacher’s dirty looks.”  The graying, fifty-four year old bartender eyed each of them warily as if both had stolen his last dream as an eighteen year old, damning him to a pedestrian eternity behind a black lacquer and poorly shined aluminum railed bar serving Long Island Ice Teas to twenty year olds flashing fake ID’s who would surely vomit in short order, leaving a kaleidoscope of color on the dance floor when the crowd whipped into a frenzy as the DJ spun the Jesus & Mary Chain.  The clock struck twelve and no one heard the bell or took notice as the one-eyed, retired trial attorney stumbled past the entrance wearing a single brown leather flip flop on his right foot and a purple Converse Chuck Taylor on his left mumbling random lines from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám in French while deliberately tearing the stuffing from the left arm of a stuffed Paddington bear that had long ago lost its “please take care of this bear” tag.    The wandering lawyer smelled of beat down fear, oleander, and three month old couch Fritos, yet no one paid him nor his bedraggled bear heed as they careened recklessly through the wet streets high on youth, random Ray LaMontagne lyrics, and the promises of new and improved tomorrows.

It was a dark and stormy night.

It’s her heart and her heart is black……think of ice cream sliding into a crack.  The heat sticks to summer’s heavy sweat.   Hang around and it’ll get hotter yet.   Some things are so hard to say, even though you say them every day…