I was thinking today that here we are nine years into into the new millennium and what changes I experienced having lived over 50 years of the last century. As it is doubtful I make it 50 years into the new century I sit here watching, waiting, wondering, what new discoveries are left What a marvelous time to be drawing breath.

I scrambled to say something thoughtful or entertaining about whatever it is I have been reflecting back on these past few days. I`ve made several runs at this entry, but have come up short each time. I can`t decide which sort of knot to tie on this life of mine life before I haul it to the attic.

The problem seems to be my ambivalence about the whole thing. On the one hand, there`s this hard-to-describe sense that history is passing a threshold. Sure, a purely arbitrary threshold, as arbitrary as when a person turns 21 or 65, but being 21 or 65 does change things for a person. What will be different for you in this century? I don`t have a clue. I suspect some things will be different, probably things we`ve not thought of yet.

I`m not talking about Iraq, or Gay Rights or Politics. Anxiety over such subjects has been a distraction from what might matter most: namely, the significance - if any - of entering the 21st century. I, for one, am a little weary of hearing about Iraq, or politics, or the environment and such. And will be relieved when the darn things are finally over with, one way or another. You never lived in the Stone Ages, so it will be worth it to stop the fretting for a bit and considering some other things.

On the other hand, writing an entry about something that hasn`t already been said is proving to be a sticky wicket.

I thought a good place to start would be to talk about Britain`s Queen Victoria. Her reign lasted so long that her monarchy became synonymous with the whole century of the 1800s. She was Q. of E. from 1837 to 1901 - 64 years - and now everyone from historians to antique dealers refer to things from that era as "Victorian."

This set me to wondering: What things associated with this present century will become permanently stuck in antiquity, the antiquity of this millennium, when history turns a page 91 years from now? What things and ideas will people think of as "old-fashioned" merely because of their connection to dates with a 2 beginning it?

But the Queen Victoria idea didn`t really go anywhere. So I tried a different tack. I`ve always thought of any given moment as being like a cosmic seining net, sifting a constantly flowing river of time through the fine mesh of this present moment. The past has already passed through the net. The future has yet to be strained. Some things get stuck in the net because they`re too big to fit through, like sea turtles stuck against an ocean drift net. But this idea didn`t seem to go anywhere, either. Sort o like this journal entry.

So then I tried looking into the future. Imagine a time when only a few people alive today will remain on the Earth. Children will ask, "Grandpa, tell us about the 20th century. What was it like back then?" We`ll feebly clear our throats, adjust the quilt across our laps, set the brake on our wheelchairs and begin in quavery voice: "Well, I remember 1999 like it was yesterday. ..."

Nah, nobody will want to hear that. I think the problem I`m having with this entry is the element of uncertainty. We`ve all got our pet theories and predictions. But no one really knows what`s about to happen. It`s like a giant sinkhole in the highway - we want to stop, get out of our cars and peer into it. It`s probably just an ordinary sinkhole. Or it might go clear through to China. We just don`t know yet.

Tell you what I`m going to do. I`m going to go about life as normally as possible for the time I have left of it. I`ll leave my shotgun where it has been gathering dust for the past 10 years. The trigger lock is still in place, and the key is somewhere around here, I`m pretty sure. If Terrorist start pouring across our borders or a cataclysmic civil unrest occurs, I`ll just be in the same boat as everyone else, with no bunker in which to hunker.

I may just sit home tonight, and have a drink or two,and flip on the telly. Then I`ll sit a while - watching, waiting, wondering - fall asleep, and wake up tomorrow, glad I`m alive and ready for the day........and the future what ever it brings.

Kartofle

AS I find some old posts I am going to add them here. Most of you have read this one.

I couldn't shop at the old corner drug store anymore. Just about everything has been forgotten within the dusty book jackets of what we call history. Of course yesterdays triumphs and tragedies may well be tomorrows' trivia. Who could tell the difference? Walking down these lonely dark streets? Maybe you would find what you were looking for. Maybe you thought that you'd been following your stars then one dark and lonely night, just like this one, you looked up at the clear Texas moonlit night and found that it was none of the above.

After a few blocks the old buildings became busier, trendier, authentic places populated by last years people. I like last years’ people I decided. Maybe I had been wrong, maybe it wasn't dark outside after all, maybe it was just the mere absence of the human spirit. Time passed slowly like rush hour traffic of the mind.

My eyes lowered to the sidewalk, some little things always tend to slip through the cracks in the sidewalk and our souls. I walked in the direction the sun had gone down, once this had been a great neighborhood. About 80 years ago my father had spent a summer working for a Polish man selling vegetables to housewives. The polish guy had a horse and cart and loaded it up with fresh vegetables from the farmers market, then proceeded down the streets and alleys shouting out the produce available. My dad rode a top the cart.

Clothes lines like medieval banners across every backyard as the horse and cart plodded along. My father ran the purchases to the housewives as they wiped their hands on their aprons.

My dad told me the one word the peddler yelled most often. The word was kartofle. It means potato in Polish.

Now 80 years later my fathers oldest son was walking down the same streets, looking no doubt at the same buildings now boarded up clinging to each other for dear life.

The vegetable peddler was gone. The housewives were gone. The clotheslines were gone. My father was gone. All that remained were some trashy vacant lots, a few sad buildings, and an occasional alley leading from nowhere to nowhere.

I paused and looked around the once alive neighborhood. The air turned an almost primordial cold that seemed to come from somebody else's iceage. I peered out at the desolate landscape where every now and then the dull glint of old buried railroad tracks became visible below the dirt like scarred, submerged hard to find veins of a dying junkie.

"Kartofle", I said.

There was no one to hear me except some street person sitting on the steps of a darkened doorway, he just kept his eyes down.

Either he wasn't polish or he didn't want any potatoes.

time

Time drifted by as it tends to do in hospitals, airports, train stations, whorehouses, and slaughter houses. It drifted by like a hobo in the night, so slowly, so swiftly, so silently, that you almost forgot it was there: little minutes, little moments, little pieces of our lives we can never recapture, maybe not ever make right, but little pieces of our lives that no one is ever quite sure of what to do with.

The present blends with the past and the faraway becomes suddenly very close to the heart and the lost and distant are suddenly near and dear and the pearly shells on the childhood beach are the bright, dead leaves in some old forgotten mans front yard.

background music

In the background was music, soulful and diverse, and it leaned heavily toward the kind of music one found from the sounds of prom dresses rustling across a long ago high school gymnasium floor.

There is nothing wrong with the music, its just that it has been long forgotten. There was "i Want you I need You I Love You", Mustang Sally", "Up On The Roof". Buddy Holly, Elvis, The Stones, The Drifters the Beatles. I had on a White sport coat and a pink carnation. She had on a soft pastel blue chiffon over multiple petti coats. I'm not sure which was worse the reality or the event.

I could see all my childhood friends, and I'm not sure they would enjoy seeing their names in print today.

Each song playing in my head was personal. The final song "The Sound of Silence".

I wanted to follow the music back to when it was appreciated.

Objects in the rear view mirror were closer than they seemed.

We danced in the depths of a future in the hopeless faraway Coupe Deville sky fanned by the stars of crossed wings of now, never, and forever.

What essentialy was the last day of childhood, the oddly poignant eulogy of a child growing up too fast in a world gone suddenly sad.

schotz

A relative happy child hood left me hideously unprepared for life.

I knew a girl who kept losing her keys. It's possible looking back on things, that she really didn't want to leave. But that of course could have been just wishful thinking on my part. See I let life get in the way. As many of you know that at one timeI wanted to be a star, and maybe I should have been wishing upon a star.

Over the weekend I went to the establishment that once was the former Schotz, my favorite Amarillo watering hole. Schotz closed down a few years back due to the arrival of what Lauen called the Wal Mart of Bars came into Amarillo.

The new place was familiar, but with unfamiliar faces.

I spent several hours drinking, and dreaming and watching unfamiliar faces and dreams pass by like so many center lines down a lonesome rural Texas highway.

I like certain bars, You see wanna be karoke singers. You see pieces of peoples lives that will never fit together again. You see couples holding hands like in a story book.

And at times you want to grab the karoke microphone from the person holding it and announce, " Will the person in the sky blue 1953 Cadillac please return to your vehicle? Paging Mister Holly, you flight has been cancelled. Patsy don't go walking after Midnight."

The bad parts about a bar is it is difficult to call yourself so you can hear your own voice remind you that if you don't die trying to get out of your own way you'll never be the person you always wanted when you grow up and become an adult.

Bars are also sad. They cannot effectively really help us. Their bars for Christ sake not shrinks. They know their own decor, their own brands of bars and liquors. They also know one gives a rats ass.

This particular new bar with its new decor had pictures of faraway places. Like Rome, Paris, London, Las Vegas, reminders that there are better places to be on a Saturday night than Amarillo.

The girl who kept misplacing her keys and I had spent many evenings together at this place when it was Schotz.. The best scenes in a bar are much like the best dreams that are often dreamed in cheap hotels. Like all star crossed lovers we lived in our dreams and dreamed of our lives.

After one such evening she found her keys and drove away. as I watched her disappear from site I murmered to myself, " Wes you are witnessing the end of a fairy tale."

That was the exact moment I realized I was never going to be a prince.

The trouble with girls who keep losing their keys is that you have to keep saying goodbye to them until one day they are finally gone, and you realize that all of your life you've been busy saying goodbye or dreaming.

Maybe it had been the dreaming of her and the drinks, that when I left at closing time and stepped into the brightly lighted familiar parking lot, that the cars and people appeared hazy and unfocused. But then it might not have been the result of dreaming or drinking. It could be that's just the way the world looks when you have tears in your eyes.

hmmmm

I have seen what I`ve loved
slip away an` vanish. I still
love what I`ve lost but t` run
an` try t` catch it, I`d
be very greedy

One more thing

One more thing about Freckles.

Who needs a house pest always letting down your dreams as well as your toilet seat?

Apple Trees Rose Bushes and Ghost

On this day in 1997 I buried my beloved mother, from which much of my soul comes from. It was a cold and wintery morning and the funeral was attended by over 200 persons of whom my dear mother had affected in some way with her beauty and love. many years ago I wanted my children to understand more about what my mother meant to me so I wrote the following; with some revisions I repeat it here today.


A wise old man named Slim, who wore a John Deere Tractor gimme cap, drank warm Jax beer in infinite quantities, listened faithfully to the hapless Old Houston Colt 45's, before they became the Astros, on the radio, and he was my grandfather to boot, once told me something I've never forgotten. He said, "You're born alone and you die alone, so you might as well get used to it." It didn't mean much to me then, but over the years I've come to believe that old Slim might have been on to something.

I live alone now in the apartment behind where my mother lived for almost 30 years, and I'm getting used to it. Being a member of the Orphan Club is not so bad. Sooner or later, fate will pluck us all up by our pretty necks. If you have a family of your own, maybe you won't feel it quite as much. Or maybe you will. I'm married to the wind, and my children are my legacy, My friends in cyberland, and the few I have here in town, I love them all. I don't play favorites. But I miss my mom and dad.

In the past sixty plus years, hundreds of people have come in and out of my life. And a few here stand out above them all. I wish I had a big ranch to invite you all to ride horses in the canyon, swim in the river, and explore the country side.

My mother died in January, 1997 a few days after my birthday, just a few weeks after Christmas, and my father died in February 1988, just a few hours after I had dinner with him. I can still see my mother at the old place in Wellington, after she retired, planting the land she owned with stuff she would can in the fall. She lasted a whole 7 months retired in Wellington, before she moved back into the apartment previously mentioned. It took a while but I finally sold that old place. The person who bought it asked me if the land was good for farming or grazing.

"No," I said, "All it was good for was holding the world together."

I miss it myself now. Every year mom would go down there and open it up for two weeks and the annual family reunion would begin. No one takes to time to get everyone together these days. Haven't seen most of the relatives since mom died. I can see her at the reunion, at the big hoedown, at the friendship circle under the stars. I can see my dad wearing his grey uniform pants from Ideal Paint and Body Shop, where he was boss of the paint department for 35 years. After he retired he still had those white shirts with his name on the pocket, and grey pants delivered each week to his house. We buried him in a new uniform from the unifrom company. It just seemed fitting since I had only seen him in a suit about 6 times in my life. I can see him painting a 55 Chevy in the building we had built in back of his house after he retired, where we restored special interest cars, slicing the watermelon at picnic suppers, sitting in a lawn chair out on his front porch. Talking patiently to any one who would listen. If you saw him sitting quietly there, you'd think he was talking to one of his old friends. Many strangers became just that.. ......I don't know how many baby fawns ago it was, how many stray dogs and cats ago, or how many homesick days ago, but fifty-plus years is a long time when almost everyone else is gone.. Yet time, as they say, is the money of love. And Mom and Dad, though divorced in 1968, put a lot of all those things into my brother and me. I wish that their adult lives had been given over to children, daddy longlegs, arrowheads, songs, and stars. That they lived in a little green valley surrounded by gentle hills, where the sky was as blue as the river, the river ran pure, the waterfalls sparkled clear in the summer sun, and the campfire embers never seemed to really die.

I was just a kid, but looking back, that's the way I remember it.

What I remember most of all are the fishing trips.

It might have been 1953, when my I first lost a relative, my younger brother was swept into the Pacific Ocean from Fort Clatsop Beach, Oregon by a huge tidal wave caused by an earthquake off the coast somewhere. At five I thought I had entered the grown up years. The grown-up, outside world liked Ike that year and loved Lucy, and Hank Williams died, as did Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. I believe now that I might have been vaguely aware of these things occurring even back then, but it was this sudden absense of my little brother that gripped at my heart. And those later losses of people who molded and shaped my life hasn't made me any braver when I know someday I will face my own departure from this earth. Every year the days pass faster and the memories grow bolder. Precisely, what I am trying to say here I'm not sure. The days of summer have faded. Maybe I just wanted say thanks to some of you, without mentioning names and becoming sentimental....you know who you are, I don't need to say it. Maybe I just want to make sure you know I appreciate your kind words, your audience, before you to move along.

Mother planted these wonderful rose bushes up and down the block and two apple trees out back. Years after my mother's death, the apple trees began to die as well, from neglect, by the people who have lived here since. ...that and the lack of rain. Yet there are a few green branches left, the birds still ruin what few apples that do try to fight the summer heat, and a couple of robins still make that tree their summer home. Some of the neighbors thought the trees were an eyesore and more than once offered to cut them down, but Fred the landlord won't hear of it. I think he regards those rose bushes and apple trees as little pieces of my mother's soul.

I more or less took over the caring of the rose bushes each year since I have been back. As the last 9 years have passed by, I grew into the job. It is amazing how thorny rose bushes could have such a profound influence on your peace of mind and the way you looked at the world. Now, on bright, mornings, I stand in front of the old 4-plex, squinting into the brittle Texas Panhandle sunlight, hoping, I suppose, for an impossible glimpse of a late summer bloom or of my mother or my father. They've all gone far away, and the conventional wisdom is that only the roses are ever coming back. Yet I still see my mother cutting that first batch of blooms each spring for a centerpiece.

One of the apple trees finally blew down last night as a strong front with high winds came through last night and this morning. I pulled the broken branches and what was left of the trunk out to the alley for its final place to rest, Though it will always have some place in my life. One of them is in my heart. And I still see my mom picking apples off that dead tree, only the tree doesn't seem dead, and neither does she. It takes a big man to sit here with tears running down his face admittting that to the few people who will read this today, but I don't think you will mind. I'm just taking some time to talk to some good friends, taking the time to talk to a few ghosts.

breaking up

I keep reading my fellow former Jspacers journals and all I see is one relationship after the other having problems, So today Mr. Advice Man, is going to inform you how to break up.

The ideal way to break up is the one featured in the famous best selling book and movie, Love Story, where the beautiful heroine, sensing that the relationship is getting a little stale, contacts a fatal disease. In real life, however, its never that easy. You never have a really good reason for breaking up with the other person, so you feel guilty, and you put off confronting the problem. I have a friend who found it so difficult to tell his mate he no longer loved her that finally, one day, they actually got married. There they were, this big wedding and the bride in front of her friends and family, thinking this was the happiest day in her life and he was standing there in a rented tuxedo, thinking. "Should I tell her Now?" Nah Better wait till after we cut the cake" This kind of thing happens all the time.

So if you are going to break up, you have to overcome your guilt and break up now. Otherwise you will never find the person you want the person with whom you can find your goal of life long happiness. You should follow the example of famous former ravishing beauty Elizabeth Taylor, who sheds husbands like Kleenex and has found life long happiness dozens of times.

Of course you major concern, in breaking up, is how to do it in such a way that the other person doesn`t get so upset that he or she stabs him or herself. Or Yourself. I recommend that you take the honest approach. Come out and speak the truth. That is always best, in the end. To build up your courage, practice holding imaginary conversations with lover, wherein you set forth, calmly and rationally, the reason why you feel the breakup is necessary, then try to imagine, and sensitively respond to, the various bjections your lover might have:

YOU: Listen, I, um, I uhhh........

YOUR LOVER: Yes? Is there something you wish to tell me?

YOU: ahh Ummmmm

YOUR LOVER: Are you trying to tell me that , although you care for me deeply, and you will cherish always the times we have had together, you really feel that we need more space to grow and enrich our lives as separate individuals? For my sake as well as yours?

YOU: Well.

YOUR LOVER: Then perhaps it would be best if we broke up, with no ill feelings or remorse on either side.

YOU: Okay by me.

After you have mentally rehearsed this dialogue enough times, you simply go through it again, out loud, but this time in the presence of your lover. You will be surprised at how smoothly it goes:

You: Listen, I um, I uhhh...

YOUR LOVER: If you break up with me, I`m going to kill myself.

YOU: I was thinking we should get married.

There! See how easy that was? I am so very happy for the both of you.

If I cannot find those little patches for my inflatable girlfriend, I will write for you already married couples advice on getting a divorce

7th inning Stretch

On January 7th, 2009, (yesterday) I turned 62 years old . Impossible, you say? How the hell do you think I feel? I didn’t know whether to have a birthday party or a suicide watch. I have received many misguided cards and a few inquiries from paleontologists, but basically all being 62 really means is that you’re old enough to sleep alone. In my case, having breezed through my entire adult life in a state of total arrested development, it’s especially hard to accept that Annette Funicello has been eclipsed as the most famous former Mouseketeer by Britney Spears. The older and wiser I get, indeed, the less I seem to know. Soon I may become such a font of wisdom and experience that I will know absolutely nothing at all.

Some of you, no doubt, believe this stage of evolution has already occurred.

This is where seniority comes to the rescue, for the older you get, the less you care what others think of you. You may find yourself peeing in Morse code, but you’re still happy to water the garden of wisdom once in a while. When hotel magnate Conrad Hilton was a very old man, someone asked him to share the most important thing he’d learned in life. “Always keep the shower curtain inside the tub,” he answered. These may not sound like words to live by, but you’ll have to admit, it’s good practical advice.

What does being 62 amount to? Yesterday I was cooking chicken gizzards for the dogs while watching Wuthering Heights. I forgot about the gizzards until I saw smoke billowing out of the kitchen like the fog on the moors. This is what it amounts to, I told myself, asking in the same breath, “Where are all our Heathcliffs?” and “Now what did I do with that damn coffee cup?” We find the coffee cup eventually. Everything else we’ve lost, however, winds up as a wistful reflection in a carnival mirror.

According to my friend Ron, guys our age are in the seventh-inning stretch. This sports analogy may be lost on Iranian mullahs and other non-baseball fans. Or perhaps everybody knows what the seventh-inning stretch implies, but most of the world is too young or too busy to think about what it means to baseball or to life. A lot of wonderful things can happen after the seventh-inning stretch, but statistically speaking, it’s pretty damn late in the game. None of us are getting younger or smarter. About all we can hope for is lucky. But at least we’re old enough to realize and young enough to know that when the Lord closes the door, he opens a little window. Old age is definitely not for sissies, but those of us who are chronologically challenged can take comfort in the words of my favorite Irish toast: “May the best of the past be the worst of the future.”

Sometimes I wonder why I made it to 62 when almost all the people I’ve loved are either dead or, at the very least, wishing they were (as you may be, reading this). My fate, apparently, in the words of Winston Churchill, is to “keep buggering on.” It’s too late for me now to drive a car into a tree in high school. Yet I remain a man who at times feels like he is eighty, at times forty, and at times a rather precocious twelve. What I do not feel is 62. Sixty-two is ridiculous. Sixty-two is unthinkable. What God would send you to a Pat Green concert and send you home feeling like the Ancient Mariner? I’ve lived hard and loved hard, and I was supposed to die young—though if that had happened, I never would have gotten the chance to order the Lu Ann platter at Luby’s.

All that notwithstanding, when you get to be a geezer, you can gleefully gird yourself in garish geriatric garb. I’ve lately taken to wearing an oversized straw hat like the one van Gogh wore when he painted The Night Café. Unfortunately, van Gogh wore lighted candles on his hat, which was one reason they put him in the mental hospital. Other heroes of mine who wore large straw hats are Father Damien, Billy the Kid, and Don Quixote (none of whom saw sixty-two except for Quixote, who lives forever in the casino of fiction). And, of course, there’s always Juan Valdez.

My life, it seems, is a work of fiction as well. As a reader, it’s getting more and more difficult to find books that are older than I am. For instance, I’m currently reading J. Frank Dobie’s A Texan in England, which was written the year I was born. When you read books created before you were, the pages are green fuses—leaves of grass through which, as if by some arcane form of spiritual osmosis, you receive the wisdom of the past. Writing a journal at the ripe young age of sixty-two however, is quite another matter. Larry McMurtry remarked that nobody writes great fiction after sixty. Hell, I was just getting started.

My father, in his later years, would wake up in the morning and say, “It almost feels good to be alive.” The older I get, the more I understand how he felt. I never emulated my late father in surrounding myself with people still older than I, but needless to say, this task would get harder all the time should I try. In the shallow, sallow world of material wealth, I’ve tried to follow in my father’s footsteps as well. When my accountant, once asked me what my financial goals are, I responded, “My financial goals are for my last check to bounce.” This witty outlook is very much in keeping with the gypsies’ definition of a millionaire: not a man with a million dollars, but a man who’s spent a million dollars. (The gypsies have been reading my email.) At reaching 62, I find that I am rich in the coin of the spirit.

That may not buy you a cup of coffee these days, but it might just buy you a big, satisfying slice of peace of mind.

To Bring You up To Date

To bring you up to date on the parallel worlds of TCBnTX and Wes.

I looked out the window wondering why I had made a decision to write about people that had flown too close to my soul. When one does this you embrace an honesty that almost makes you feel ashamed.

Doomed beautiful people.

A want to be writer is sometimes like a small child at an occasion and he doesn't fully understand if it is a wedding or a funeral, and in the end, I suppose it doesn't matter because the child will soon learn to see and hear and think like everyone else and maybe someday he will write it all down and make it disappear. There is another school of thought. and probably the prevailing one, which contends that literature and art do not make things disappear but instead makes things last forever. Both schools of thought can be right and wrong and sometimes both at the same time. My school of thought is by writing about my friends as I sometimes do, that I am paying tribute to them.

I suppose that by looking out the window I might catch a glimpse of my friend Bill, or Miss Amarillo 1969 or maybe either one of my parents and so many others whose love never had no sell by date. I sat back down at my computer to write something today. I filled my coffee cup. It smelled of sadness, perfume, and ice cream memories, and I knew that in time, like everything else in the nonfiction world, it too, would soon disappear.

II.
Nothing ever changes, I suppose, in Amarillo or anywhere else in this unpleasant, never ending, nonfiction world. Fundamental change is virtually impossible for our species. Like little chirpies, we build our nest and construct our buildings, which time and terrorists and termites try to tear down. Like leaf cutter ants, we construct our highways that connect many different places in such a way that eventually they all become so similar there is no point in going anywhere to begin with. Like beavers, we build our bridges so when things aren't going very well people can jump off them and kill them selves, which is probably what I shouldl have done the first time I met Freckles.

I wanted to paint, I wanted to live, I wanted to write the world's best journal. And, to be sure,eventually in my mind I did. But, writing this journal did not bring fundamental change to my life. Far from it. What it has brought I should say, is a series of rather meaningless stories thought at the time were important.

They weren't of course. They never are.

I don't, by the way, believe the compilation of this journal has anything to do with much more than being a chronical of one mans deeds and thoughts. Writing a journal is a lot like writing a novel. It doesn't harm children or green plants or chirpies. It's like putting someone you love between two covers and forgetting to kiss them goodnight. Then you leave them there forever as you move on.

But it can't be too lonely when you are sandwiched between two covers.

People usually look in from time to time.


III.
Late Christmas Eve, Freckles was holding both my hands searching my eyes for something I don't think she ever found. She had called earlier, "Is this the number I call for a real good time?" She had shown up and handed me a card, inside scribbled in a child like hand was a broken heart.

My own heart was not faring to well either.. The night, was in a state of creative interruptus. Some of us seem only to excel at lying in the gutter and looking at the stars. I knew what was coming, it has been coming for a long time.

"I think we are breaking up."

"You will write about this, won't you."

"Maybe."

"I'm begging you, don't suck all the magic and the humanity out of us."

Neither of us said anything for a few moments. Neither of us, I suppose had anything much left to say.

Finally Freckles broke the silence. "I'll just grab some of my things I 've left here and go home."
Later she called again.

"So long, Wes ." She said.

"So long, Freckles," I said as both of us hung up simultaneously.

We had both done many things together, I thought as I stared up at the ceiling. Saying goodbye together wass not something I had envisioned us doing together on Christmas Eve. Suddenly, the ceiling looked very lonely and the room seemed very empty.

I thought maybe just maybe, I was now unhappy enough to become a great writer.