The eve of New Year's Eve Dec. 30, 2023

  

It's the eve of New Year's Eve.

So naturally, I am sick again -- at a time when I usually consider my own mortality.

None of us -- None of the Garley gang for sure -- thought we'd get to live this long despite Hanks one time prediction that we would all grow old on a porch somewhere in rocking chairs.

For some reason, this year is particularly poignant-- perhaps because I've focused on Paulie too much and traveled to sites where he would have been had he lived.

To say the world is going to hell in a handbasket is an understatement because it is clear that those people we always considered whackos in the past have now become the curators of this insane museum, nut cases who believe in man made climate change, UFOs and sexual identity confusion.

we can all accept this as an outgrowth of the 1960s in which we all wanted to have our freedom to do anything we wanted to do and we did, and the result is a total destruction of those structures that keep society whole.

That said, I spent most of the week sleeping -- at least 48 hours straight in one stretch. My cure for anything from a common cold to deep depression is to sleep, and most often it works.

Unfortunately, it also means that I sort of fade into myself and start becoming more circumspect, trying to figure out where life went. and why, and whether it is where I intended to be when I first conceived it.

It is more difficult to track the past by the New Year's events since I never considered New Year's anything but a pain in the ass, a kind of reminder of aging, whereas Christmas was always positive event for me and I generally remembered where I was and who I was with even it was later days when they stopped celebrating it openly.

But I do remember a few of them, such as the one when I was in the housing projects from 1960 into 1961 or when I was in Los Angeles on the run, and later still a few others like the kiss I got on New Year's Eve in 1977 to 78 by someone I did not know at a party with the band.

Christmas Eve 1979 into 1980 was memorable because we were at Dodd's Orange, playing and after the event we trashed the bar, bartenders, owner, bandmates, roadies, groupies, throwing ice and drinks at each other until the whole place was complete mess.

But besides all of those events, most of the years melded into each other like melting wax so that I could not tell one year from the next by that date.

I'm not sure what we're going to do this year, most likely hunker down and let the world go crazy around us as it was in 1960s when we thought the world would come to an end

Of course, I do remember vividly the New Year's Eve from 1968 into 1969 when Hank and I braved the cold to go to Times Square where we got pushed and shoved in a manic craziness that made me vow never to return.

These days, it is an endurance test no one should have to endure -- the fact is that you have to be there many hours ahead of time perhaps ten and get locked in like prisoners, and no bathroom no, backpack, no drinks, no celebratory anything. It is a kind of sentence for anybody brave enough to go there and have being punished for their audacity.

But all said, who the hell knew we would live this long and that we would see the world change so dramatically and so painfully away from all that we hoped it would be -- Even though we hear protesters chanting the same slogans we chanted, and suddenly realized how deluded we were then and how deluded they are now, and there's nothing anybody can do about it nothing anybody can do to make these people grow up faster so that they world does not come to a crashing halt because of their stupidity

This, of course, is old age speaking -- not being wiser so much as just having seen all of it before and realizing the folly that we live by, constantly repeating things.

They say that those who do not know the past are condemned to repeat it and this is very true many of the people who are protesting now who do not know the past or have made up their minds to completely distort what really happened in order to justify their Insanity today.

There's a lot of people who blame Donald Trump for this, and indeed he may be the most responsible since he decided that he was going to destroy the game in which politicians live by, this kind of false narrative that allows politicians to pretend like they represent the people, when they really represent themselves ,and a threat to that ,  any attempt to dismantle it,  brings an automatic backlash which we are seeing today instead of being seen as a Christ-like figure he's being seen as Napoleon and that's the problem they eventually poisoned Napoleon in order to stop him. We have new ways of spreading poison these days, it’s called main stream media.



email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Positive omens? Dec. 24, 2023

Image
      In a week heavily endowed with omens, I thought for certain seeing the funeral procession on our way to Asbury Park posed a dark day ahead. After the amazing omen from our Thanksgiving trip (the whales), I hoped for nothing to counter this positive vibe. The trip down went smoothly, with the except of a few whacko drivers pretending to be Indy 500 racers, and we parked in our usual spot near the top of Asbury where it interacts with Cookman and took our usual stroll, peering into the old merry-go-round house before passing the fake Christmas tree of lights, the Empress Hotel (with its rainbow street crossing) and down the board walk from the Casino to the Coliseum. Even though we had arrived late, the boardwalk was largely empty – although there were a few groups of people on the beach, foolishly standing on the slick jetty stones to pose for pictures. Even inside the coliseum, the only crowd was at the coffee shop, and even this was less well-attended tha...
Read more

Natural law October 18, 2023

Image
    I saw the pigeon after I had put out stale bread for the birds to feed on. He looked healthy, although he clearly had troubles since when the other pigeons flew off when I came into the yard, she did not. She was either injured or young, but she could not fly, walking around on the concrete in search of food while the others later congregated under the feeder where small birds dumped seed on the ground where they could feed. I spread some seed near the crippled bird only to have the flock of healthier birds swarm down on it, stealing whatever seed it could reach. Worse still, the two young cats that come and go from our yard took notice of the pigeon and began to stalk it. I had seen these cats hunting smaller birds a few days earlier, managing to catch one, which they tortured (played with) for some time before mercifully murdering it. I did not want them to do this to an even more helpless bird. I shooed the cats away. Eventually, I took up the bird, put it i...
Read more

The more things change Dec. 11, 2023

Image
    The rain came in spurts as I made my way to Secaucus for my usual Sunday laundry. I don’t always go to Secaucus, sometimes returning to the old neighborhood in Passaic -- as I will likely do next Sunday when I visit the grave of Peggy, and the graves of my ancestors in the other Lodi cemeteries, dating back to John the Baptist Sarti, who arrived here just after the Civil War. But most weeks, I don’t want to travel that far as was the case yesterday, when I parked near the laundromat, put my laundry into the machines, then headed off to the Dunkin a block away for coffee, a Dukin I briefly worked for after I got fired from the Garfield Dunkin just before my wedding in October 1990 (a time when I had four part time jobs, three of them at different Dunkins, and a fourth as a cleaner for a firm that manufactured elixirs straight out of the 1800s. My history with Secaucus goes back to the 1960s when Hank and I used to pass through it on our way to New York City, at a time...
Read more