Author: Larry Jones

I feel like I’ve lived too long.

Like a guy who has made a deal with the devil. I get to live as long as I want. Heh, heh — only eventually I discover what Satan knew all along: that immortality is hell, and after a few hundred years I’ll be begging to end it.

I started this blog just a couple of years ago, so you’d think I’d have some reasonable expectation that my magical, invisible, virtual “friends” that I made in the early going would still be with me. And some of them are. I won’t list them — you know who you are, and you are the wind beneath my wings.

But my mind keeps wandering to the friends I’ve lost. Some have simply vanished, leaving no way to reach them or find out how they are. Some have made announcements, ranging from “I’ve been discovered at work and I have to shut down” to “I have nothing more to say,” to “I’ve got a book deal, so long, suckers!” Some have deleted their blogs and pornographers have taken their blog names and planted pages of nasty links where once were the writings and art of people I sort of knew.

Each time one of them departs I get that “deal-with-the-devil” feeling: I seem to be going on and on, even if a bit sporadically lately, but my bloggin’ buddies are departing the blogosphere, leaving me behind, feeling lonely and a little desperate. In self-defense I become more withdrawn. After all, why make friends if you know they are going to leave you? This is a little weird and pathetic of me, I know, so I’m trying to buck up.

In the meantime, I hope all you lost sheep are OK.

In another room, a glass shatters.

Jarred from my work, I am angry, jangled. It’s nothing, really, just a broken glass, but heat rises in me anyway. Why isn’t she more careful?

I resist the urge to go see what happened. It’s nothing, but seeing it would only make me grind my teeth. And I’d have to clean it up.

I should have run off with the circus when I was seventeen. Except I can’t do any circus tricks, and clowns give me the creeps. What’s up with the crazy makeup and the big shoes? Is that supposed to be funny?

Maybe clowns are pathetic people, so desperate for attention that they will wear big rubber noses in public and put on baggy suits in outlandish colors, just to keep all eyes on them.

But no — they must be hiding. Hiding in plain sight. They must be horribly, painfully shy, and they are hiding under the heavy makeup and oversized costumes. Why do they want to be clowns, then, doing pratfalls, tooting their little horns, cramming themselves ten at a time into impossibly tiny cars? There’s a sad, frightened little person in there, isn’t there?

I guess in a way I did run away with the circus. I ran away with a rock band. Actually, a series of rock bands. They took me first to the homes of friends, where we tried to figure out the songs we were hearing on the radio, using pawn shop guitars, all plugged in to one overloaded second-hand Standel amplifier, everybody sharing a single six-dollar Radio Shack microphone.

We graduated into backyard parties in the next town, where we played crude versions of the songs we had taught ourselves, using borrowed and rented gear. We played “Battles of the Bands” for cheesy prizes at car lots and shopping centers. Some of us disappeared along the way and newcomers who played better (or had better equipment) were recruited to replace them. At some point we found ourselves organized into groups that actually sounded OK and had real gigs at real parties and dances and nightclubs and saloons and pizza joints.

We got more sophisticated and more into it and inevitably some of us hit the road, which I guess might be a little like running away with the circus. You go to strange towns far away, and you have only the stuff you brought with you and the people you work with as touchstones to your old world. You stick out as aliens. The locals treat you bad, or they treat you good, but you can’t ignore the fact that they treat you different. Because you are different.

You live with the band, maybe not in trailers or circus tents, but when you venture into the street during the day you might as well be wearing a bright red wig and a clown suit, because everyone knows you are not one of them.

At night you stand up in front of them and do your act, and most of the time they let you do it. Sometimes they show you a little love, sharing that small part of themselves that can be shared with someone who won’t stay long, can’t be part of anything. You will be there only a short time, and the End of Your Gig waits there at the stage door that opens on the alley, smoking, patient, persistent. The End of Your Gig says there are other bars and bandstands, other sights, other women in the next town, and now that you have run away, the deal is that you have to keep on running, even if you can’t remember why you’re doing it.

Justin Timberlake: WTF?

This morning I am beat up of body and hoarse of throat

…because yesterday I played and sang loud, high-speed rockabilly for three hours, seriously thrashing my Strat and my Deluxe (and me), and then stood in the cold, windy parking lot for an extra half hour, reliving the fun with the guys.

My voice is deep and resonant today, though, and I’m sure I could sing some of those old Leonard Cohen songs, whose range has escaped me in the past.

Lesson for this weekend:

OK, so it turns out that if a great big cockroach manages to get into your house and you want to, you know, kill it, and you whack it with something that flexes a little, something that’s not hard and brittle, like a rolled-up newspaper, what you get is a great big dead cockroach, usually on it’s back. Then you quickly cover it with a paper towel, pick it up and throw it in the trash.

But if you step on that great big cockroach — assuming you are fast enough to get it — what you end up with is a great big, disgusting splat! and a thick puddle of white and brown goo on the floor and no one in the house can suppress their gag reflex long enough to pick it up and dispose of it but somebody has to do it and you know it’s going to be you.

Oh, and the tacky pus-like mess is also on the bottom of your shoe, and you’ve got to do somethiong about that, too.

So a word to the wise: use the rolled-up newspaper.