To paraphrase Iggy from 37 years ago...
AND NOW IT’S 2005
AND FUCKING HELL, WE’RE STILL ALIVE
(Of course, some of us aren’t, but what can you do?)

As I wake far too early on the first working day of the New Year, now going for the midpoint of the first decade of the new millennium, I find my thoughts highly scattered and my imagination vividly fragmented, while wondering if am still able to play the hand I seem to be getting dealt. Motherfucker looks too much like an inside straight. An old phrase from Bob Dylan keeps running through my head. "May you have a strong foundation/When the winds of changes shift." And I ask myself, do I? "Well do I, punk?" And I would hazard a guess that, when my internal dialogue is awash with Iggy, Bob, and Harry Callahan, it’s a telling symptom of the condition my condition is in.

DON’T YOU JUST LOVE THAT MOVIE?
"In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and what did that produce - the cuckoo clock!" – Harry Lime

The secret word is Zither.

THE BLACK DOG
Of course, though loath to admit that I am hideously superstitious in the sub-basement of my ruined belief system, the black dog (see January 1st) still has me a little spooked. In the folds of England’s green and pleasant South Downs, the black dog is the harbinger of Death. But you meet him coming towards you in the lane, not running past in the mean and lonely Hollywood street, so maybe it’s Something Else. It has been variously suggested that it was (all referential to my fiction, which is, of course, superstition made a tool of the trade...
1) The ghost of Jim Morrison
2) The ghost of the black Labrador in the famous (color) photo of Jim in leather jeans and a blue workshirt.
3) "Maybe it was Yancey Slide*, being fully satisfied with his feat of Tsunami in SE Asia, just stopped by for warning to a U.S. citizen, grinning wide behind his tucked-in tail ...?"
* Once the current hired gun work is executed, I will complete the final episode of Slide On The Run. (See Funtopia if you’re not down with that rebop.)

CRYPTIQUE – Where the hell is that junkie nurse? I need a joint, an accountant, and a Valium.

QUOTE – "Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell