The Anarchists Library

I remember the library at the center of the apartment in Jersey City where I lived with the tribe of anarchists. The walls were filled with books that could not be found anywhere in the USA, including bookstores and public libraries. The books read with titles like “The Free” and all sorts of titles I will not list on this public blog, not due to my own paranoia, but just common sense. Search is now being used by global law enforcement, and if you have any experience with books of this nature you will understand.

My bedroom was only large enough for my futon, and the walls were a medium gray wood paneling. The doors that opened onto the library/book distribution were badly stylized saloon doors. It was there I met Frankie, the chemist, who first turned me onto my first hit of freebase. But that story is for another day.

Life as a white guy caught in the hood…

Nuthin good to say about the city of Jacksonville Florida. One of the worse places on earth in my book, thats fer sure !

The sound of a .44 Magnum round as it flies by your head in the close confines of a car it quite unique. I shan’t forget it anytime soon. In the fading afternoon light, me an Johnny got ambushed by a group of jitterbugs who had been hired for this task. After a desperate struggle over the car keys though the window, a mad dash down the dirt road road warrior style, the inevitable appearance of a very large handgun and the distinctive ‘Boom Boom Boom’ of a large caliber handgun, huge bullets, whizzing as angry bees, punching through the metal of the car, zooming by my head.

Rivington Street

The sun beats down on the scrap metal yard and smithy that exists in the middle of the block on Rivington below Houston Street, NYC in the mid 80s. Artfully stacked wrecked cars are strategically positioned around an open air work space. In the center of the space is an active Smithy, the air driven furnace fueling white and red hot coal.

The sound is a mixture of Zion Dub overbeat and the steady drum of metal being pounded by ribar by 30 or so different people perched in different places around the wrecked cars in the compound. Over the immediate dim, out of the dissonant cacophony there emerges a strange and even beat.

Fast Forward

I am on a beach. Not any beach, mind you, but one of the most beautiful beaches in the world.

The island of Kuai, on the Nepali Coast, one of the most rugged breathtaking stretches of beach to be found on planet Earth. It would be so very popular, if not for the fact that it is so damned inaccessible. & days backpacking to get you to the cliff face, then a difficult and dangerous descent down the reverse face to the lava formations emerging from the Pacific.

Story Time

I am going to use this blog to talk about my own personal life in art. Lets talk about Frankie, The Chemist fro Jersey City. Frankie was the son of a ‘retired’ Polish hit-man who had a knack for testing the purity of shipments of cocaine. When I met Frankie I was living with the Anarchists in a small apartment in Jersey City.

I have been very sick and in bed for several days. When I finally emerged from my room there way this long haired character hanging out in the room Where Dave, the patriarch of the Anarchists have his Anarchist book distribution business.

Frankie was taking a hit off of a Skippy bong, and when he saw me he saidm ‘Here, take a Hit’ I did, thinking it was pot, and when the rush hit me I started to have a mild heart attack and collapse. Frankie quickley took out a banana ang forced me to eat it;

‘Potassium’, he said.

Visions of Heaven

What is a life ? I have spent a long time reaching into the depths of my soul to see the answer, though dodging bullets, to falling down drunk, to the ethereal plains of the mind.

I am not sure, some call life the cosmic joke. In times of my deepest despair I have not been laughing, but I am certain if I have been seen by others wallowing in my self pity, I have looked more than funny.

Lately I have been working on a daily gratitude list to gain some perspective on what my life is about now, today, and been saving the deeper questions till later. I have spent too much time lingering on the ‘deeper questions’ and this enterprise has born little fruit.