Flagrant Insouciance

Woke up with Diamond Dogs blaring in my head

As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent
You asked for the latest party

Oh yeah, Babies! This tune inevitably brings me back to my last year on the carnival road. Particularly to some bucolic spot well outside of Chicago (where we’d been playing South Side street corners all summer). I was so eager to get the fuck off the road, to start my next chapter. I’d play Bowie and Talking Heads at top volume on my little 8-track (yes, an 8-track), vibrating the walls of the pickup truck cap that was “home.”

I had to get through spots in Texas and Louisiana before I could, rucksack over my back, board that Trailways outta Lake Charles for Boston. I made it. Thanksgiving Day, 1980.


Insouciant
adjective
showing a casual lack of concern.

You need to be flagrantly insouciant.
You care way too much.
And because of that you will be paralyzed for life and miss out on everything.
~ Wendy Wunder, The Museum of Intangible Things

Study the past if you would define the future.
~ Confucius

What have I learned from my past to aid my future? Humor is good. Music — even if I can’t hear it outside my head anymore — is a lifesaver. Yesterday I was ‘listening’ to the Carmina Burana. AWESOME!

"Go back?” he thought. “No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!” So up he got, and trotted along with his little sword held in front of him and one hand feeling the wall, and his heart all of a patter and a pitter.
~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

No, you can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime you find
You get what you need
~ Rolling Stones

I saw my earlier selves as different people, acquaintances I had outgrown. I wondered how I could ever have been some of them.
~ Roger Zelazny, The Courts of Chaos

This wasn’t prayer anyway, it was just argument with the gods.
Prayer, he suspected as he hoisted himself up and turned for the door, was putting one foot in front of the other. Moving all the same.
~ Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion

This morning is my pre-op COVID test. I’ll be stunned if I have the GQP Plague. I haven’t left the house (‘cept for MGH) in a month, have no symptoms and only see Ten, Jen and Oni, (also without symptoms and VERY careful).

One foot in front of the other, I draw closer.