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Neil Young’s Jacket...In the corner, above a blue Formica counter lined with water glasses and pancakes an old nineteen-inch TV connects the seventies style coffee shop to the war in Iraq. The fragile waitress slides a pack of Marlboros back on top of the freezer, patting the front of her apron smooth as walks out of the kitchen. On the other side, the plate-glass offers a vista of the parking lot wet from morning drizzle. I sip tomato juice and push a copy of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest away from my eggs. I’ve read it before. Nurse Ratchet and Billy Babbet the stuttering boy, the Chief and the fog that takes over at night, Keysey’s dead. I finished High School in seventy four, eighteen and reckless; long hair and torn up jeans. Where was Hoffman? Joplin dead… Hendrix dead… Morrison dead… Dylan lost… I worked in a small warehouse in Glendale in the rain, and waited for Gringrich’s Contract with America, became a teamster, had kids and watched Clinton talk about Monica. I love the wife and kids. The rest of it is a lot of bullshit; TV, politics, fads, trends, nationalism, religion, pop culture, however, nature’s brutal honesty and the artist’s genuine contribution rejuvenate a hostile world. There is honesty in art and there is inspiration in nature. Neil Young is smiling sitting in the middle of his family. The large corner booth contains seven people…
Hot Tuna, The Smiths, Neil Young, Tom Petty, The Cure, NRPS, Dylan, Bowie, Genesis w/Peter Gabriel, Grateful Dead, Smashing Pumkins,Modest Mouse, Killers, Social Distortiion, Silversun Pickups, Beatles, Pink Floyd, Wilco, Nirvana, Hendrix, Blues, some Jazz, Joni Mitchell, Bucket Head,
A Confederate General from Big Sur, Look Homward Angel, Light in August, The Red and the Black, Leaves of Grass, Don Quixote, On The Road, The Bell Jar, One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Choke, Lullaby, As I Lay Dying, Williams Carlos Williams, To A God Unknown, Of Mice and Men, The Winter of Our Discontent,Robert Frost, Tortilla Flats, Cannery Row, The Trial, To the Lighthouse, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, In Watermelon Sugar, Ulysses, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, The Catcher in the Rye, Thel, William Blake, Shakespeare,King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Frankenstein, Sanctuary, Faulkner (no matter what Bukowski thought)Ginsberg, Amy Tan, Emily Dickenson, Joan of Arc by Mark Twain, Raymond Carver, The Abortion, Slaughterhouse Five, The Mysteries of Pittsburg, Brave New World, 1984, The Sound and the Fury, T.S. Elliot, Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy, Ezra Pound,Homer, the Adventures og Augie March, Fran and Zooey, The Great Gatsby, A Moveable Feast, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Walt Whitman, some Bukoski, Trout Fishing in America, Herman Hesse, Wrecking Crew, Into Thin Air,
Secrets... . Three thirty seven, three thirty six, it must be on the other side. Seven forty. The small, gray locker was located near the center of the long aisle. I wanted to thrust the key into the lock and open it immediately, but for a moment I paused. A stout, dark woman wearing a faded turquoise sweatshirt clutched an old yellow and brown suitcase, while tilting her head to instructions bellowing from the P.A. Bus stations are dropping off points or slow exits for the less fortunate. They offer cut-rate transportation for tired, divorced fathers visiting their unwed daughters in Boise, and necessary steerage for tangled Hispanic families who board smoky busses bound for El Paso, while clutching grocery bags filled with clothes. A young girl with stringy, yellow hair wilted in her seat next to a boy resting a small brown sack in his lap. They looked on—without expression—as I stood there for a moment slightly dazed retracing in my mind what had happened.