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.