I didn’t sleep at
all after going to bed just after midnight on Thursday. I got up at 1:00 to see
if a shower would help but I was too full of the caffeine from my first coffee
in a month and so I sat for an hour fiddling with a poem about clouds, angels
and cadillacs.
A
lazy stream of obese clouds
with
funny haircuts on their skulls
on
dark flat bellies slide down south
above
an angel made of rust
who
looks up on that parade
to
all the glitter and the plumes
of
those clouds that cast their shades
dancing
over avenues
for
driving topless Cadillacs
long
and red from ‘63
with
extremely lowered backs
and
licence plates that scrape the street
and
drivers that look like Wayne Knight
Newman
from the Seinfeld show
Who
rev their Cadillacs with pride
And
to be seen they drive real slow
And
decorating each rear-view
Where
Newmans check out their haircuts
Each
car holds hanging from a noose
A
little angel made of rust
When I went back to
bed I don’t think that I slept but I did zone out enough to lose track
sometimes of the passage of time.
After yoga, guitar practice, trying
to transcribe the song “Les Millionaires” from audio and reading some lecture
notes, I went to bed again but still couldn’t sleep. I laid down for an hour
and got up again. In the early afternoon I went to bed again and finally got
some sleep for almost an hour and a half.
I reviewed all of my lecture notes
from January to April in preparation for next Wednesday’s exam.
I did another edit of my poem
“Cumulonimbus”.
I started re-reading my lecture
notes.
I made curried lima beans for dinner
and watched The Rifleman.
The story begins with Lucas and Mark
discovering that the North Fork school has
been vandalized by a former student named Johnny Clover. Johnny was 18
and much older than the other kids but he had been a very good student.
Suddenly though he’d declared that he didn’t want to go to school anymore. The
teacher, Miss Adams doesn’t want to press charges and so Lucas goes out to talk
to Johnny’s uncle Gus. Gus says Johnny doesn’t want to go to school but he’ll
work out a way to repay the damage. The reality though is that Gus forced
Johnny to say he didn’t want to go to school. After Lucas leaves, Gus tries to
beat Johnny but Johnny beats him back and then he drinks his uncle’s liquor and
goes into town with a gun. He begins to shoot up the saloon until Lucas comes
in. Johnny points a gun at Lucas and tells Mark he’ll shoot his father if he
doesn’t tell him how hard his father whups him. Mark says that his father never
whups him. Johnny says, “That aint fair! I been whuped every day of my life!”
Lucas disarms Johnny and Mark convinces his father to give Johnny a job so he
can pay the damage he did to the school. Lucas organizes a picnic to raise
money to replace the school books that Johnny had destroyed and Johnny draws
portraits of people for $2 each. He’s so good at it that he has a lot of
customers. Suddenly Gus shows up with a whip but instead of whipping Johnny he
says he’s going to shoot his drawing hand. Lucas shoots Gus in the shoulder and
stops him. It turns out that the ranch was Johnny’s inheritance from his
parents and that Gus was just acting as guardian to live off Johnny. After this
incident Gus leaves and Johnny sells the ranch so he can go to art school back
east.
Johnny was played by Dennis Hopper.
Miss Adams was played by Patricia
Barry. She was known as one of the hardest working actors in Hollywood and
though she mostly played supporting roles she appeared in over 300 films and TV
shows.
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