Friends Forever

I was reflecting earlier this evening on the time when I came across a letter from the great writer Somerset Maugham to the editor, and readers, of a small and, I thought, rather insignificant writer’s digest. It was shelved among some other literary choices at the supermarket near where I lived at the time - in North Hollywood, at the home of my brother and his growing family! - and I was stunned, and then saddened, to read his plaintive missive.  He was, in a word, alone, in that, his later, life, and wondering if anyone ever read him anymore, or even had heard of him.  ‘This is tragic,’ i thought to myself.  ‘The author of ‘The Razor’s Edge’?  And some excellent short stories??  No such writer’s life should end like this,’ I thought; ‘someone who has touched so many lives with his, like an incendiary touchstone.’  

I got thinking of that moment in my life, because I am involved in mankind at the moment in the form of reading a book about the late (in March of this year) Pat Conroy, in his words, and the words of his legion of devoted ‘followers’.  ‘Now there is the way such a writer’s life should end,’ I am thinking; ’surrounded by a swarm of loving family and friends, expressing their grief, and sadness, and the joy of his having been in their lives.  Having passed their way in the great parade of life on planet Earth.'

Pat Conroy, if you have never dipped into his ink well with him, can be, well, touching, and sometimes almost unbearably moving, in his prose; and that, coupled with his monumental sense of humor - born as well from the human comedy itself - makes him rather well worth a read.  A man who killed himself far too early - with at least two long novels left in him, and three shorter ones, he believed2 -  because of his sedentary life, in trying to get it all down, and in polished form, to share with us, before he could no longer.                      

Read him. Make his life having been worth the living.  And observing.  And sharing.  Don’t leave him on the shelf.  Like a Somerset Maugham; bereft, at the end, of contact with his audience.  And, perhaps, wondering what it has all been for.  if not to be lived on, by, and through, others.

I think all this, here, near the end of my own go at a life - living alone, in a small pig sty (because I can’t be bothered cleaning it up, with just me living - or is that, rather, existing? - here) - and beginning to wonder, What’s it all about, Alfie??  For the Seventh Cavalry doesn’t seem to be riding to the rescue.

I wonder why.

Does it have to get worse before it can get better???

But it can hardly get worse than it is.  With America -  America; the last, best hope on Earth for human freedom to dictate to us each, as sovereign souls with free will - having been turned into a surveillance state of the first order.3  

Or I should say, more accurately, and with dual meaning intended: 

rank.

Speaking of dreams deferred………

—

footnotes:

1 I had come back to Hollywood, where I had been living since I had come out of my two-year stint with the Army - as a c.o.; another, though related, story - after having been inspired to start walking across the continent to Washington, D.C., “to see the president and draw to his attention that the way to rid ourselves of all our aches and evils is to do away with money,” as I put it to letters to the editors of the newspapers of the towns and cities that I passed through on my way; and, having accomplished my mission - at least as far as getting to a side entrance to the White House, where the Secret Service fellow assigned to take care of the strange young guy with a cheap sleeping bag rolled on his back, like a snail (I had my proper backpack & bag stolen along my way), politely took my letter in tow - and with no other place left to go, really, my brother invited me to come live with them, until I could put the pieces of my partial-birth aborted life back together.  He moved to North Hollywood to a small house upon the birth of his first child, needing more space than the apartment that he and his wife were living in in Tinsel Town at the time (he was trying to get a film off the ground; another, similar story), and I tagged along with them.  Through a number of years, and the birth of another child, and to another, larger, house, and two more children.  The original move itself, and my quixotic trip across the continent, was in 1961.  Do you get the point of my case now?  Now that Crisis has provided us with Opportunity??  Apparently the only way that humanity can be roused to take actions???    

2  “I feel the first itch of the novel I’m supposed to write - the grain of sand that irritates the soft tissues of the oyster.”  

   He didn’t make it.  

   Our loss.

3 And especially with the latest crappy arrow in the quiver of TPTB being launched at what they call the 'fake news,' i.e., information made available in the alternative news world that they can't control, as they do via their pet poodles in the MSM.  Though - being the masters they are at dark measures - some of that alt news stuff is disinfo, designed to discredit the whole realm.  Be careful.  Don't believe everything that you read even there.  But when it gets confirmed, by enough info about it, believe that it is as bad as it looks.  These people are not just rogues.  They are evil.
   Meaning, they have turned full away from the Light.  And are heading in a direction designed to end in their obliteration from the pool.
   And not just the gene pool.