Wicked Bill Wickland

Bill's Musings
(see Bill's Launch!; Bill#3; Bill#4; Bill#5yet?)
Published with permission of great friend/independent writer, Bill Wickland

Hey Wordlubbers -

I really can't name my favorite author, though John Barth leaps to mind more often than any other, and Kurt Vonnegut helped me understand myself; but in any list of three, Tom Robbins is there. I guess that's it. I just named one, two, three. But Mike Burgess has a book of columns out, so is he an author? He's a favorite of mine. Our Kesey wrote two of the best in our language. There is an actor named Robbins who is also great. Funny how names go in hot streaks at certain times.

But this writer guy Tom. He loves words so much; he lives in rural Washington even though he's a southerner, because he loves the name of the nearest town - 'Humptulips'. Weird damned name. Did you know he has a new book out? Celebrate! It is called Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates and I have a copy to read. I think of surviving 'Nam warrior victims in wheelchairs, but you know, those of us who vigorously opposed that war paid also - we were often made not valid, no-account effin' hippie pinkos. And we simply had too damned much fun to be normal.

I don't know what Robbins is going to show me this time; I'm only on page five, and I hurry to the E-machine. Maybe I do this because I want you to say to me: "Yeah, man - right on!" so that I know I am part of something, not just an observer.

Howard Fast is another amazing author. He wrote Citizen Tom Pain and many, many, more. Brilliant guy. In one of his I just read, he describes why Jews are so hated. They don't join. They don't share the assassin's guilt. I feel like a Jew. If I didn't resemble my dad so much, I'd believe I was a product of my mother's hot moment with a Jewish co-worker while a department store employee during The War. I rarely join, either, and I have actually had persons say to my face that they hate me because I smile too much. Three persons even said they fear me for the same reason.

Well, hey - so I have dear friends and lovers; none of whom are in Reedsport right now, and it is St. Valentine's Day evening following a glorious sunny St. Valentine's daytime. So, I'm struggling with the question of whether to go up to 'The Rainbow' and see if I can snag any for only the second time in 15 months, here in this beautiful town. I'd better go, if I'm going, before I drink too much of this bottle of Grant's, so I'll have a little left here to share if I do get lucky.

Holidays were a real good time to get lucky during my best hustle years, and that statement does not put any person down in my mind. Holidays are for the family, and those of us from dysfunctional families would bend the rules on holidays, just to be close to another warm human on that night. During the hustle years, any night was one of those nights: help get me through the night - what a great line! Many of us felt that way, and had a little enjoyment.

Human bonding is a wonderful thing, even if it does not lead to marriage and overpopulation and suburban crowding and gangs and drive-by shootings and homeless people hovering over steam vents in the colder climes in February. And strange is wonderful. It is a form of peace. Let your defenses down with another human, whichever sex may be your preference, and be unguarded for a while. In orgasm, be helpless with another human, but not afraid. At the least, do a little dance and have a little kiss.

Shake it, baby!

Again, from Bill: an insightful countryman of our times:

I was born in 1938, so the first four years of the actual 50's were my teens. Heaven. Our elders had just won a war, and a guy with a job in a gas station could support his wife and family in a house they were buying, driving a car they owned. The first four years of the actual 60's I enjoyed in the Air Force, and the second two of those years I spent in London, England. Golly gee whiz!

Then I came home to the U.S.A., but not yet to Oregon. The midwest. Learned something about that. The Africa with white people of the North American continent: I survived that. Then I was home in Oregon for what we now call 'The 'Sixties' - Heaven. Then bad stuff started happening at what seems like a faster rate than before, and that stuff is still going on.

Now I am conscious of places that are not "paradisical" for the people who must be there now. And when I was in paradise, some of my current friends were not-- at the same time on this same planet.

So shoot me, but I somehow grokked this latter-hippie notion when I was about nine, in the Oak Grove Community Methodist Church, before they grossed me out: if someone else anywhere, ain't happy--

I ain't happy. Don't shoot me, just call me carzy or crazy. I lived in the 'fifties paradise and in the 'sixties-to-seventies paradise. What a gass! I am living in a little paradise now in the oh-ohs, but I have escaped to here, where there is air and water and land and space. I think those other places are losing that sort of stuff. I don't like a lot of what I see on TV. So get rid of the TV. You think I am crazy? I need the tube to see stuff to bitch about, and in the actual Reedsport of the early oh-ohs, there isn't much to bitch about because there isn't much going on. Thought you'd like to know. luvyerfriendbill Sure glad I checked my E today!

Oh Geez- the calendar just informed me that tonight is the full moon, and I have thirty dollars more than I need to have in order to continue my existence. How should I spread that largess around? Sometimes I hide in my hidey-hole on a full moon, so I don't screw up too many innocent people by going out in the world and spreading my rap. But I got some rough-out (inside-out) suede cowboy boots at the Florence St. Vincent de Paul for six bucks a month ago, and it is really dry in Reedsport tonight, so I could wear them up to the Rainbow Inn, and if I didn't drink too too much, I could give good tips, as my earth-mother daughter advised me to do one time. Her mother recently told me that our daughter is biz-wise now.

Does she still tipas largely as she did when money meant nothing to her? Did her paradigm change? I hope not, but then, I am only her dad. So, should I go out tonight and risk running my rap on the innocents, hoping to find soul-mates who won't be affected by my bullshit, and just may screw my mind up and point me toward a new way to think? I think (if we can call 'thinking' the thought processes of one with a half bottle of single malt going for him) that I must go to the pubic tonight under the stars and the full moon. I can walk to the Rainbow. Can you?

I guess this will bug two old girl friends in the valley of California, two women who remember me from when I was a very innocent smiley kid in 1960, and who found me on the web, and now seem to be pissed that I have lived the rest of my life, so far, or so far out. It seems that they might be unchanged, not just in the soul where we all reside, but in their activities as well. It seems they both still have their first husbands. And they are Californians. Imagine that! What a couple of freaks. They were, and probably still are, just gorgeous. Not only to look at, but to be around. I s'pose they are rounder now. I haven't said this on a typewriter in a hundred years, and maybe never said it for publication, but I always think of all the persons I love or admire or both when I am happening, including the persons who are dead, as if they are all in a sort of a college lecture room filling the seats in my mind, and I am at the podium, and I am asking: 'So, how'm I doin'?'

In my next life, I'd enjoy the same sort of setting, but instead of asking questions, I'd like to be playing the vibes. Those lovely California babes tell me what they think out front, even though they haven't seen or talked to me in 40 years. I love it! They say: "Get off the drugs!"

Well, in their honor, I get off when I can. Ain't life grand?
Hey! It is the full moon of May!

-luvyerfriendbill --Sure glad I checked my E today!
Want more Bill#2, Bill#3, Bill#4, Bill#5 or Bill#6 yet?
& Wild Life, Unusual Oregon

© 2003 R K Puma rk@rkpuma.com
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