When I heard the news the baby and I went to bed. I don’t know how … but we both fell right to sleep. Perhaps it was the shock.

Before John Lennon formed The Beatles, entertainers were brand names to be marketed and sold. The words they spoke were fed to them based on careful calculations. A really good example of what I’m talking about is the Netflix movie “Mank.” It’s about the early days of Hollywood when the public was fed stories about their favorite stars and those stars were expected to play the roles assigned to them. For example, the story that Mary Pickford was a forty year old virgin was a joke in Hollywood but apparently believed by her adoring public. Screenwriters were generally established writers slumming it for a few easy bucks. If asked to write a script for a political ad that deliberately mislead voters, they were expected to comply or risk being ruined both financially and professionally. However, when a writer knowingly deceives his readers, he generally calls it fiction.

Anyway, like the Mank character, John Lennon, whether you liked him or not, showed us that honestly over time is the only thing that gives art meaning. It’s just a damn shame he’s not here to lead us all into old age.

If you’ve ever read Duke Miller’s stories (which I repost here often), often they are grim recollections of his twenty years of refugee work, filled with regrets and sorrows but beautifully written. This is particularly true of his first book “Living and Dying with Dogs” and its companion piece “Handbook for the Hopeless,” a guide to getting and keeping a job (and your head) in a war zone. After our publisher closed up shop and we formed John’s Motorcycle Storage and Rare Book Disposal Publishing, Duke combined the two books into “Living and Dying with Dogs, Turbo Edition.”

It has been said of Duke that being pissed off is his way of dealing with life, however, his newest book, Tragedy Wears Many Hats, reflects a man who is in love with love, living in a world that conspires against its survival.  Oh, there are a few pieces of “prose poetry” as he calls them, which bemoan the human condition, either comically or tragically but … well … I’ll post a few passages and you tell me if I’m right.

From Map of the Lungs:

My happiness blinked as I rolled to touch your warm skin, you were an ocean where the mountains rose beneath and the skeleton fish darted through slim channels, in never times, hours unkept, and I journeyed there, sighting upon your star-shaped pores, drinking at your eyes, never to live like that again, and I saw your map of lungs, there, at the bottom of the sea

From Dressing:

We are all so helpless in this life, even the strongest and the richest and the wisest … the burden of scars forcing us to crawl while others run

Yet, there is the dressing of love, let us gently press it down

From Emaciated Horses

You need only tilt your head and let the wonder become your eyes and there it will be, everything great and small, the warm sad beauty that gives us life, that covers us with this terrible love we cannot name or forget

From Your Eyes:

I think of you and how easy it is to die, so very easy, and it is a lonely thing, but what a joy to have been part of your eyes

I received a 2021 calendar in the mail today. It’s nice to know that someone is hopeful.

2020 lies exhausted and sends forth her fierce and determined cub. It’s an image I’ll keep in mind as we go forth into strange territory.

The strange Red Quill which bloomed so spectacularly as my mother lay dying and a million acres burnt to dust here in California, is now spent but at its roots, seems ready once again to surprise me.

A few days later it was splitting. And what’s that on the other side?

Another bit a green amidst the dying leaves. You just never know.

I voted weeks ago and so tomorrow I’m making bread … from scratch. Rosemary, garlic bread. And I’ll eat it hot with plenty of butter. And I’ll try to keep in mind that fierce little cub. She’s coming.

Today would have been Connemoira’s birthday and she would have celebrated at that lake high in the mountains she loved so much if she hadn’t hated life just a little bit more.

Oh wait … she tells me … not life. Just the machine. The clogs.

I’m not sure what she means but let’s on, shall we?

Why … has been a puzzle for a long, long time…

The machine Jan. The machine!

I continue: She was born to loving parents, the eldest of five siblings, a rollicking group prone to taking off in pirate ships (aka rubber rafts) and looting the peaceful villages along the river looking for gold.

This much is true, she says with a smile. We were best when we were wild.