Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Where To Start

My Three Sons, My Mother, and Me, 1996




This blog is a "fresh start" for me. The astrology-minded would say I've had a particularly difficult 'second Saturn Return'. I'd say someone as youth-culture oriented as me is just not cool with being 60. 50 was fine. I kinda enjoyed joining AARP, "playing at" not being the younger-than-I-look street fighting stand-up philosopher I like to see myself as. But this last year has been saying, to ill-quote my fellow alta cockers, the Rolling Stones, "time ain't on my side, no it ain't!" and I have to accommodate at least some the realities of the fantasist-idealist I like to be, to the reality I am coming.

Meaning no disrespect, but starting this the day after James Brown, my homey from Augusta, passed on, and the Day the Warren Commission finally closed forever with the death of Gerald Ford, is, in this one sense at least, fitting -- end of the calendar year, end of two icons of "my time" and end of all the energy I've put the last twenty years into a fraternity that turned out to be the stuff dreams are made of, turned to nightmares, turned to dust.

I'm calling myself henry_allen here, and that will do. I suppose someone sooner or later will recognize me from my former cyber-incarnation going back to the early days of the Internet. My interests are my interests, my face is my face, I am a bit of a poet, yarn spinner, my wife hates me calling myself (after Mel Brooks in "History of the World Part One" a Stand Up Philosopher, but that, for better or worse, pretty much sums up what I am. A bit of a poet, a bit of a writer, a bit of a warrior, a bit of a rogue, tryin' to make sense of it all.

Hello, blogger.