.....and who are you, man of yesterday, myself, as per my adventures downtown, with a notepad in tow? the writer here transposes his notepad entries live, as it were, as he is a spontaneous idiot and balladmonger of just such a sort as would pull such stunts as this, all the while calling it Art. Here are the entries, as they are, scribbled. Here the writer will add that as he, being a luddite, was logging onto his Reedsy page, and finding the Reedsy blog by way of a search engine, luddite that he is (backwards idiot? don't you have your password saved? and you actually use a search engine?), the writer accidentally or by way of laziness only wrote Reeds, and then pressed enter, and what came up was not the Reedsy blog he was looking for, or searching for. He had to type-in the "y" too, obviously necessary, this "y" is. Reeds just gets you reeds links, links for reeds, which are well enough.

"Reeds-y." Remember.

A perfect example, so the writer thought, as this was all going down, of the need, the necessity, for proofreading, for re-writing, for editing, for all that stuff. Blast it, he then said to himself, and so enters here his notepad's entries, live.....

Monday, May 31st, 2021

I'm on the Goldline transfer bus, reading from the pages of Baudelaire's psychological biography, an interesting pick, reading the section in which the biographer mentions a letter Baudelaire sent to his mother, in which, in a contrarian reference to the previous decade which he, the great French poet, spent extravagantly on bouts full of decadence and laziness, he writes to his mother that he had spent the last year (in atonement, as it were, specifically, as he put it, for the many years prior) "less stupidly than the others."

As in, he had spent his time less stupidly than he had spent it during other times past.

Spent them less stupid than the others, really, Mum.

And, due to a frightful amount of emotional egoity and a Samson-like poetic reference capability, Aye speake undear mye breathee to myeself-

"I declare to write an autobiography under just that name. Some use Shakespeare lines, I'll use one of Baudelaire's. L.A.'s spleen'd soddies."

LESS STUPIDLY THAN THE OTHERS

by J. Storbakken

Passing the ramen restaraunts of Little Tokyo's First Street promenaude, glancing glances out the window and eyeing all the conversers and slurpers and smilers and smilees and feeling sentimental and very, highly poetic pangs of something close to guilt over my decision to use such a name for my autiobiography, but anyway, passing the restaurants there, I smiled out the window.

I am reading about the great Baudelaire, about his love for the works and writings of Poe and DeQuincy, and here I am, merely an omnibussed and oaken Bard, berating myself over my Hashish use.

And now, off the bus, walking up First Street to Mariposa Cafe, the one by Mariachi Plaza and the community bookstore, passing the high school on First Street, scribbling and scratching in my notepad as I stumble up First Street and walk along the wall which marks the soccer field, at the moment, I think I'll stop and rest and have a little lean against the wall for a quick sec'.

I once wrote a little piece here, at this intersection, First St. and Gabriel Garcia Marquez St., near the Pico Aliso Goldline Station and the local high school, the piece was about me standing here writing, yet that time I was standing at the crosswalk waiting for the light to turn, and there was a driver, a man, who's turn it was to go in the lane, but who was nonetheless stopped in the middle of the street looking back and forth from the street sign's name to my figure on the corner there, with his mouth open. Funny, really.

Back, as I was walking down the sidewalk, I passed the high school gym. I heard the squeaking of the basketball shoes from within, and was thrown, as I walked down the sidewalk, into a memory of my first year of college, saying out-loud there, "I haven't heard that squeaky sound in a while."

My first year of college when I used to park up over the hill and walk by the farm with the sheep and cows and cotton trees hanging and by the ivy-logged roadsides and through the back entrance of the college in Pomona, right by the high school, where I'd pass, on some days, the practicing girl's volleyball team, whose shoes would be making the same noises, and there passing, though we were only a year, perhaps a bit more, apart in age, I would feel fatherly feelings of tender and manly rapport for them and with them, and strut my stuff on to my Nutrition class.

Now, further up the sidewalk in Boyle Heights, I pass a lady lying on the sidewalk, dipping a chip into a plastic cup filled with something like salsa, and the chip, she was dipping it violently, as if stabbing something in the something like salsa. Poor deranged soldier of dirty, senseless streethood. An animalistic dip, indeed. Steven King's appetizer. Shaded essences. Am I an Essene? Can I help this woman, somehow?

On the 260 bus-line now, after a quick coffee grab at McDonald's, down by Atlantic Blvd, and I just passed the CVS on the corner of Whittier and Atlantic which used to be a movie theatre, the building it's occupying. Same building was a movie theatre mother used to go to as a child.

I saw a man, as the bus drove up to the bus stop there on Whittier, wearing what I thought was a STAR WARS T-shirt, but what ended up being a MORTAL COMBAT T-shirt. The circular, red insignia. I laughed, grunted more like, and a few gently folks here on our gentle-riding bus stared at me. And then I grunted again, helpless to the surfacing laughter I felt.

How fragile life is, that, as I feel the strange and gentle intimation to catch a moment in time down on a piece of paper, I also, as I catch that intimation, see and feel the moment which the intimation had sought to mirror slide away; it is so strange. Poetic fragments, indeed.

Reading about Joseph Campbell's explanation of oneness, At-One-ness. He says the human being must take responsibility for both his own wild freedom and his own discipline.

Today while riding the bus toward Lakewood, I felt the afternoon sink in throughout the landscape out the window and into my own inner sense of comfort found throughout this time of the day every day, and I let that feeling really sink in, and well I was just so happy just to be alive, strolling along: busride-bound: notepad-bound.

Then, that feeling, that feeling: the desire to write it down. And the sentimental experience then vanishes, and it leaves a canvas in its place, if you will: a room, in which to write down one's Newtonian and Proustonian and Louvrenian and idealistic fancies, sciences, by-one-mores, and lookabouts, and keep and get them nice and organized; the bus driver is a writer, the writer is a writer, the rider is a rider, and the guy in the back seat a-scribblin', he too, see.

fin-del-notepad, for today