Dear Jack,88, you would've been today, had you persevered with Buddah, and not the Bottle! OH!!! How I would love to sip a whiskey and smoke a cigarette with you today, listening to Charlie Parker, prophesizing and philosophizing about art and literature, about life, with all it's torture and it's beauty. Happy Birthday you ole' fucker! You, handsome, crazy, brilliant wacko, Sexy desolate devil, insane genius – You!
No jokes the cosmos tell, as I walk down the same streets as you and your clodhoppers of the 1950's, near Colombia Uni. I can almost smell your rotten football gear, hear your yell of howling bellows of joy and pain, feel your love. This is not your New York, buddy, this is my New York now. Your New York of yore, with it's industry and spontaneity and naivety, that (thank god) you painted clearly with your words, reminding us to live a little, have some fun, get into some trouble, let go, loose the labels and to love, love, love, whatever that meant to you. So today your words help us to pay back, what was before and remind us, that nothing is what it appears to be, yet, it's so much more.
I'm on my way back to 1967 today. Two years before you left this crazy world, but long after you gave into your woes. You, the original "hippie", before the rest of America knew what a hippie was, you gave the soul to a generation long before they could put a name, or a mane, on it. Because of you, I get to make Art today, because of your inspiration, imagination, figuration of life through special lens! Wow! I just got a whiff off my old road, not some asphalt or tar, but the aroma of a clove cigarette burning sweetly against the aroma of an Italian Roast; we know how you love anything Italian- Dante, Dames, Dungarees, Dripping Espresso. Dudes…
Percolating memories of my youth, and my crush on you -my chariot of discovery and discipline (which you didn't ever really master. Then, I would sit in packed coffee house, yabbing and yumming, smoking and singing, smiling and beguiling, trying to be someone, while not sure of who, but anything like you! Listening to other mislead souls rattle rhetoric off their tongues. Anything for an escape-anything. Little did I know, as I sat there in those coffee shops of Central, humid, sunny, stormy, Central Florida, you wrote about your Dharma Bums just a few miles over, some 42 years before. I guess I felt your energy. I wanted to be a bum, not really - more a bum in Balanciaga! It's the experience I hunted after, I fantasized about that hitchhike across the globe, meeting up with rondesvious and revolutions within many souls, both farm and city, of fortune and mishap. Alas, dear friend, America of the 1990's was not the America of the 1950's that you spun in your not-so fiction. So I waved my thumb out in the air and picked up an airbus to deliver me here. My New York, that was once your New York. One in the same, our paths delivered a common thread. Of much that will be immortalized in my words, on paper, on skin, and now this virtual page, that YOU never experienced! It's not an Underwood, Jack, it's an Apple. Not one you eat but one you create with madly. Maybe its better you never had a bite, its temptation might have taken you sooner than the bottle! Perhaps if you did you would have never left its side. Like I do.
Thank You, Jack. Thank you, Alan, William and Neal. Without your Roads, Your Hippo's and Your Howls, I would not write. Without you Jack, I would have no commas and commas tell a story some grammar teacher would hurl at. Run on this fragment of my imagination baby!
Make a big wish today, buddy. You are in my heart forever.
Always,
Bobby
No jokes the cosmos tell, as I walk down the same streets as you and your clodhoppers of the 1950's, near Colombia Uni. I can almost smell your rotten football gear, hear your yell of howling bellows of joy and pain, feel your love. This is not your New York, buddy, this is my New York now. Your New York of yore, with it's industry and spontaneity and naivety, that (thank god) you painted clearly with your words, reminding us to live a little, have some fun, get into some trouble, let go, loose the labels and to love, love, love, whatever that meant to you. So today your words help us to pay back, what was before and remind us, that nothing is what it appears to be, yet, it's so much more.
I'm on my way back to 1967 today. Two years before you left this crazy world, but long after you gave into your woes. You, the original "hippie", before the rest of America knew what a hippie was, you gave the soul to a generation long before they could put a name, or a mane, on it. Because of you, I get to make Art today, because of your inspiration, imagination, figuration of life through special lens! Wow! I just got a whiff off my old road, not some asphalt or tar, but the aroma of a clove cigarette burning sweetly against the aroma of an Italian Roast; we know how you love anything Italian- Dante, Dames, Dungarees, Dripping Espresso. Dudes…
Percolating memories of my youth, and my crush on you -my chariot of discovery and discipline (which you didn't ever really master. Then, I would sit in packed coffee house, yabbing and yumming, smoking and singing, smiling and beguiling, trying to be someone, while not sure of who, but anything like you! Listening to other mislead souls rattle rhetoric off their tongues. Anything for an escape-anything. Little did I know, as I sat there in those coffee shops of Central, humid, sunny, stormy, Central Florida, you wrote about your Dharma Bums just a few miles over, some 42 years before. I guess I felt your energy. I wanted to be a bum, not really - more a bum in Balanciaga! It's the experience I hunted after, I fantasized about that hitchhike across the globe, meeting up with rondesvious and revolutions within many souls, both farm and city, of fortune and mishap. Alas, dear friend, America of the 1990's was not the America of the 1950's that you spun in your not-so fiction. So I waved my thumb out in the air and picked up an airbus to deliver me here. My New York, that was once your New York. One in the same, our paths delivered a common thread. Of much that will be immortalized in my words, on paper, on skin, and now this virtual page, that YOU never experienced! It's not an Underwood, Jack, it's an Apple. Not one you eat but one you create with madly. Maybe its better you never had a bite, its temptation might have taken you sooner than the bottle! Perhaps if you did you would have never left its side. Like I do.Thank You, Jack. Thank you, Alan, William and Neal. Without your Roads, Your Hippo's and Your Howls, I would not write. Without you Jack, I would have no commas and commas tell a story some grammar teacher would hurl at. Run on this fragment of my imagination baby!
Make a big wish today, buddy. You are in my heart forever.
Always,
Bobby
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