Serenity When?

I’m over thinking again. Or is it over-thinking? Or maybe overthinking

But first, I saw the best auto-not-correct ever:

After graduating with horses in 1952, he completed a year of graduate work in English drama at Columbia University before being drafted into the United States Army…

Can’t remember who I was looking up, some playwright (and if anybody can tell me why it’s not spelled playwrite there’s a prize in the mail although not sure how I’ll fit into the envelope) or maybe I was looking up the lone ranger sounds like he needs company, but it made me realize I haven’t heard from spellcheck in a long time and maybe like when you talk about dreams and that night you get a doozie, old smellcrack will come up with something before you knob tit.

I’m on semi-holiday this week which means I’m in half the time but it’s actually the pessimist’s half because most of the day you can find me at the beach either flaunting or cowering depending on the wine.

Also I just found out that somebody who is interested in my stories has terrible taste in books. The last two he recommended were fucking horrible. Unreadable OMG LOL UGH GAK

Also also I painted that garage-sale cast-iron table-and-chairs Serenity Blue which is the colour of the new bits on a blue spruce you know sort of powdery and bright, anti-shine because I don’t know how to spell mat matte matt, and man it’s fucking beautiful that stuff looks great no matter where I put it and it’s also a thousand pounds and I moved it roughly as many times yesterday and each time was perfect but did that stop me? Today my arms are sore with pretty blue crescents of paint because why wait for it to dry and that’s the end of the rhetorical questions except just a small one are those heavy little chairs actually made for sitting?

Because I feel a fairy tale coming on every time I sit down and also half-believe which is called hope somebody’s going to serve me brandy shots and watercress sandwiches without crust they are so small and hard (the chairs not the imaginary snacks) so I guess they’re ornaments or maybe where the gnomes will sit and drink because you know they don’t just stand there all night, too.

So now I can’t remember what I was over-drinking

Think the heat’s getting to spellcheck maybe I’ll throw them in the cold-ass lake which was 11 degrees btw last time I went inout. Googled the equivalent in F although you see in Canada they switched from imperial to metric when I was a kid so it fucked me up I never quite got the swing of metric and immediately forgot farenheight and also its spelling so cold-ass and hot-as-fuck are my current indicators and down at the beach both apply something about Lake Ontario stays cold it was 51.8 Fahrenheit which is the correct spelling although weird.

And here as threatened is the first chapterish character intro from A Carnival Ago which I have wound myself up in pretty tight probably the over-thinking part right there and maybe why I was considering putting myself in the mail or joining forces with that ranger rascal it’s getting weird, I mean I’m writing about gypsies and rogues, the parts about my dad are trueish – when you get right down to it writing fiction is for me simply a place to put memories and ideas – so if you’re interested here it is and if you’re not here it isn’t.

Dannyboy

My dad used to talk about the gypsies when he was a child in Ireland how they’d come take the clothes off the line so he was taught to holler gypsy and his mother who I can’t imagine anything but old used to run from the butter house and pluck all the little socks and underwear and short pants and button-down shirts that belonged to her sons. I used to wonder if she’d pause after there was no twinkle of pink since Alice died a baby, let her eyes slip to the horizon a moment for comfort or maybe that was where she positioned her losses.

I met her, my grandmother I mean, when I was seven and her eyes were always folded into somewhere.

So it was in my father this alarm and of course he tried to lose it but you can’t pick and choose what stays and what goes from childhood, can you, so like I said he tried not to but once in a while when he wasn’t paying attention he shouted gypsy in his Irish accent which he was afraid of losing as if it were something dangling so it was more like gypsiiiii which is how he met Jones, the gypsy he hollered about, which in a round-about way is how I joined the carnival because you don’t work at a carnival, you join.

My father always told me he brought the gypsies with him when he came to Canada and I wondered where they were these miniature quick and colourful people he’d hidden in the pockets of his rolled up trousers, popped into his socks where they waved from holes, and for years I’d creep through the top two drawers of his dresser when nobody was home see if I could find them, play with them, set them free.

But what he meant of course was my mother who pretended she was Irish, said aye and naw and feckoff, cascade-laughed with only half of her mouth, and, under the careful guidance of my father, learned to drink his Moonshine Rush.

When he came to Canada, when he and my mother got off the boat in Newfoundland, he immediately started making it again but the people called it screech and he did too after some time but when he eventually started bottling and selling it legally, and this is what you might know it as, he called it Port Rush Irish Whiskey. It’s the one with the navy blue label with the cream coloured sailboat looks etched, cliffs on either side like its going through a channel when really those are on one side the cliffs he grew up on in Ireland and on the other, the Newfoundland cliffs where he disembarked.

I joined the carnival when I was seventeen. Most of my friends were working shit office jobs, some at stores in the faded mall, a few at the local kids camp we’d all hated and swore we’d never work there but it’s a job they said and a job is a job and maybe that’s the way I was thinking when I said yes to Jones’ sister Bly when she offered me the job at the summer carnival, side by side with the carneys.

Bly said come to the third trailer and it was when I was kicking through the dust at sunrise I met Dannyboy who was wearing the shirt I’d been missing, the denim embroidered one Auntie Mae sent from California that my mother disapproved of so strongly she’d given it away she told me although I believed my shirt, along with anything else I had ever lost, had been plucked from the clothesline maybe stuffed into the horizon for later.

Dannyboy was my age and like all gypsies there was an air about him that I sort of caught being half gypsy myself.

It’s a sound you can’t hear unless you’re gypsy just like the whistle only dogs can hear. It’s like the jangle when your cutlery drawer comes unjammed and Dannyboy knew it too and right away he took off his shirt passed it to me said yours and looked at me that way through the cutlery and that’s when I got the feeling like he was the one came across in my father’s suitcase, the one I’d been looking for all along.