I Feel Like I Am Dying Faster Than Usual

Looking back from September 1, 2024-:-summer reading, death, bunnies, and so on.

I FEEL LIKE I’M DYING
FASTER THAN USUAL

September 1, 2024
New Mexico, USA

Debra Landau flying over one high desert road known by Jeff and Debra over at least four decades of love and cherishing.

Love is a long, long road
Yeah, love is long, long road,
Oh, it's a long, long road

Tom Petty

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I am caught up swirling apart with my own Labor Day doldrums, finishing up my summer reading list with fear, sadness, and hatred completing “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved” preceded by “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”.  And,  perhaps the most feared and loathed Election Season of all time upon us now. As just a slight hint of fall in the high desert air and New Mexico's Old Man Gloom now burned, possibly things just couldn't be better. Or could they?

Ralph Steadman lives on; not the Great Gonzo Journalist, Hunter S. Thompson who was born July 18, 1937, Louisville, Kentucky, and died February 20, 2005, where shortly after, his ashes were canon-blasted through the air at his Woody Creek, Colorado compound complete with Dobermans and Peacocks.

I also read more than a few Sherman Alexie books (Can never be too many). It is astonishing to me that he is generously and copiously here on Substack. His Newsletter is    A + FreshChaosRated...

Yes, a fitting close to my summer of 2024 with two more fav books...One I did not enjoy as much as I thought I would, and the other, I could not put down until d o n e. Heartfelt kudos to Angeline Boulley .

Meanwhile today, I feel like I am dying, dying, faster than usual recalling coming around that bend on my HondaHawk, a mosquito, smashing into the face plate of my helmet and knowing a two by four in the road would fling me into a very dark red future of blood and pain. I feel like I’m dying faster than usual planning another medicinal crop for healing pain relief; waiting for spring, waiting for the summer rain, waiting for another year’s football season; waiting for my parents to resurrect themselves from the earth, ready for my brother to appear like Jesus Christ on the horizon and melt into the sky with fire and rain…Tom Petty is dead; all the good ones gone, all the good ones now angelic in their played loudly songs of refugee death and impermanence. And, I can’t help it: I feel like I’m die faster than usual.

Dusty cobwebs growing on my model metal airplanes. Many more I burned on our lawn and ran childlike around pretending to be that Rescue Helicopter that I so need then. Spinning propellers melting away with black smoke rising in the Florida sun of my fragile childhood tossed about on blue cresting Atlantic Ocean waves and tall, tall pine trees alive with cicada sounds on the high up cool breeze. World War II and my father are long gone way away. My mother, a shattering broken glass mirror with me shouting “Tommy can you hear me, feel me?

I feel like I am dying faster than usual listening to Rod Stewart surrounded by all these black and white pictures with books, cassettes, cardboard-art-covered vinyls, dvds, fat videos, Dad’s C-47 flying by a framed invitation to a 1947 wedding at St. Paul’s Catholic Church. And all these books that I read or never will read, the ones still not given away. Who will enjoy my perpetual collections of stuff?

Get your money for nothin', get your chicks for free
Get your money for nothin' and the chicks for free
Get your money for nothin' and the chicks for free

Dire Straights

And I keep seeing the face of Robert Durst from that TV special all about a rich mother fucker denying his murders and sins all the way until his ashes got scattered, and a past President I will leave unmentioned here as he has pained me ever since his recorded pussy grabbing laughter. I live my life unknown to most. I live my life the way I want to, I have made decisions I have had to live with those decisions. Money is not my God…My only truth is to have lived my life in my own way. Today,  I feel like I am dying faster than usual.

I have new followers. I have old followers I created thirteen websites lost to cyberspace vacuousness. Seeking Social Media Likes and Follows killed my desires for creating real and true writing. I am all over the vanishing World Wide Web with actual hard copy publishing, books, films, movies, fame, all my hard core nemeses. No one cares about websites anymore. Google something and you’ll see a Google page instead of your website so fuck it; I am dying faster than usual .

Once the earth was a garden 
it gave us all we needed
then it grew so barren 
all because of greed…  

Paul Kantner (RIP) & Grace Slick

Hurricane season’s here until November 31st with nothing too big yet, while  tornadoes blast apart lives even more than they usually do and way beyond Tornado Alley. And the earth burns all year; no more wildfire seasons. Canada is on fire again did it ever not be on fire? Did the snows of winter not extinguish the horrifying swirling storms of arsonistic flame never cease? 

Sherman Alexie asks his adoring tribes here on Substack, when did you come closest to death? Which time I ask, was it that time I was a child camping out in the night in our backyard coming into the house for warmth and finding a rock holding those sheets atop the cardboard boxes of my childhood, smashed down right where my head had been dreaming…or was it one of those times during my motorcycle Hobie Cat days drinking full bore and hating my life holding in my hot hand an unregistered Smith and Rossi 38 Special? My Days/Nights then carried within me so much fear and self-loathing  and alcohol fueled  lack of caring but that childhood cicada night in a cardboard box, I knew that I knew death had come for me and missed.

I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now. 
from My back pages 
 
Bob Dylan/The Byrds

I ask myself, have I seen the rain on a sunny day? Am I the Senator’s son? I am nothing more than effigy man stumbling off a Greyhound bus like a bag of sand, on a highway with the sun going down; I am nothing more than a boy on the dock of the bay with a giant manatee swimming under me like a whale with its own spouting sound in black waters flowing North. And whatever became of all those water moccasins you gave to the Children’s Museum encased in giant clear glass bottles of formaldehyde? What happened to me deep down in my childhood heart of hearts in that bedroom with suddenly the exploding electric white flash of lightning seared down a pine tree outside the flimsy wall beside my bed and the loudest thunder I have known rained down on me like a banshee from the movies, simultaneously chilling and burning my soul. I saw darkness over the flash and never again slept facing that side of my bed.

We lived on a dirt and clay rutty road then called,Verona where nearly all of my childhood best friend dogs loved lying in the dirt and napping. There was that day where on that same bumpy dirt road where it met Roosevelt Boulevard, I saw two by fours smashed from the back into the windshield of the car a Chevrolet Impala station wagon with 396 hp and electric windows and a tilt steering wheel and a headless driver on the floor…A bad dream sort of boyhood day for me, not nearly as awful as being happily alive and shocked to the core each and every time almost all of my dogs got split open by old Chevies and Pontiacs, a Buick or two too, one after the other until we moved from that place that was never good enough for my mother when I was just nine. 

And every one of those astonishingly bitter days, my mother would be upset that I asked her to take me to the vet with Bodger, Queenie, Silkie, Rutabaga, and the rest. Just like the day she got flashingly red-angry in her brilliant yellow bathing suit on a hot summer afternoon just back from an Atlantic Beach outing to my mother’s best childhood college friend, Helen’s ocean front home dubbed, The Beach Nuts; and unfortunately ruined by by my ridiculous crash onto the sidewalk running just as fast as I could go, pushing a Texaco Tanker truck toy, planting my sweet young face onto the hot and hard cement. I always thought it was my fault that my mother all her life with me and Dad was far more sad and angry than happy. It was Helen that I always wished had been my mother. And that afternoon with my mother angrily taking me to see Dr. Mosely for stitches and reassuring kindness was no exception. Those and other stitches were added by my father to a beautifully, set on walnut, collection of knots hovering high up on my childhood room wall. 

It wasn’t so long ago that I realized that for most of my issues pains and troubles and mostly trying to please everyone in my foggy sphere that just I no longer, Give a Fuck, and my co-dependence melted a little bit.
Then I watched a movie which helped me to realize once and for all that no matter how hard you try to stand strong on this spinning burning dying earth, 

You can’t do
Everything
Everywhere

All at once.

And lately, the seemingly daily data breaches make my lifetime of anxiety at the oh-so-clean hands of the salacious tyrants and cyber-active thieves with corporate media making us feel bad…Our sacred and sacrosanct Social Security numbers have been breached.Who has all of our information and what can they do with it ALL, anyway?  It’s just too much to ponder. Reminds me though reminding me of that time in Tacoma when I was so alone I went to BE SAFE ROOMMATE REFERRAL and soon a man with a cream yellow Chevrolet sedan with the back seats covered in lime green sheets hiding his criminal mysteries from my too optimistic naive blue blue eyes. 

A week later, three interior checks (remember checkbooks ?) and an expired passport and this man who called himself then, Andrias Werner, all vanished. I went to the Tacoma Police Department to report a Missing Person and was fearful he had been accosted at the Bank of America where he had said he was going to that fateful day…After coming to my senses that this man was not going to pay half the rent, and ultimately realizing my naiveté, gullibility and stupidity but still alive without a dark night slashed throu=at, I went to the F.B.I. Office in downtown Seattle. From the F.B.I. official I met that day, I later learned that this man was really named, Mohammed Ajlani, that he was a Syrian National and that even then he was claiming to be Joseph Francis Hartzer, Jr., my formal name used on checks and important papers like my birth certificate or on that expired and now stolen U.S. passport, while a resident of the Minnesota State Penitentiary. I also learned that my birth name my birth name had been listed on Interpol for two years.

I learned all of this after moving from Tacoma to Albuquerque with my now life partner of forty years, and trying to got denied trying to get a Chevron gasoline credit card. Turns out that Mohammed Ajlani living as Joseph Francis Hartzer, Jr., had wracked up countless unpaid bills in the State of Minnesota. I had to do two things not so easy to do, go to court to legally adopt my nickname ‘Jeff’ and then change my Social Security number…Total Nightmares ensued back in the days of being impoverished and jobless in New Mexico. My stolen identity situation got off to a booming start in the eighties way ahead of the internet. I was born very blue and premature and have always been a bit ahead of the times since.

Naturally, I wrote a very unpublished novel back then to try and help  ME understand all of the Andreas Werner/Mohammede Ajlani story. I called the short novel, SWISS CHEESE DILEMMA. It was about a lonely guy who takes his new roommate into the house of his girlfriend (and daughters) where no one got their throats slashed. Then, it was on to a huge highly secure and Nationally Guarded by men (yes, an all men band of brothers; it was the eighties) Protest against Trident Submarines soon to be stationed in a billion dollar new Naval base alongside Killer Whales and other sea life in Port Townsend, Washington. The gigantic protest that, my short term girlfriend and her daughters, Andreas, and I participated in, took place in a border town Blaine, Washington. Like many of the protests I have attended over a long life time, this one did not do anything to stop the tremendously huge multi-atom-bomb-rocket carrying Trident Submarines nor the completion of their Washington home port base located on the  Hood Canal in Kitsap County, across Puget Sound from Seattle. This Naval base by the way, has one of the largest collections of nuclear weapons in the country, with about 1,700 Trident missiles.  

An aside: Strangely for me, there are two Trident bases, this one in Washington State and the other near my birthplace, Jacksonville, Florida at Sub-Base Kings Bay, on the Cumberland Sound in Camden County of Georgia, a short distance from the town of St. Marys, Georgia very near North Florida.

‘Twas then when the Hurdy Gurdy Man 
came singing songs of love.

Donovan Leitch

It was after visiting a Naval Officer old friend and his family ON that Trident Submarine Base that caused me to love Washington State so much, that when I returned home I promptly quit my teaching/admin job in a less than a ten minute conversation with the Headmaster who says, “We can all see how unhappy you are as a ‘Dean of Students’;  you are free to go…” which I did, moving about as far as you can get from Jacksonville. And four years later with my bride to be moved to Albuquerque where our Cinderella Story enchanted life continues for now. Albuquerque is in the mile high high desert and sits vaguely between Tacoma and Jacksonville. It has been home since 1995.

You can send me dead flowers every morning
end me dead flowers by the U.S. Mail
Say it with dead flowers at my wedding
And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave.

The Rolling Stones

When a ‘foppish, chubby overlord who relies on the unquestioning thuggery of the conscienceless jackals who comprise his inner circle and staff who exist to make him look tough’ can bully his entourage into the same cemetery where my WWII Submariner Uncle, his wife, and veteran son are buried after full horse-drawn procession of caissons and soldiers marching…It is as outrageous as the former President of the U.S.A.’s whole life has been. And he is still here.

The National Guard killing in cold blood of four unarmed and not even protesting students at Kent State in Ohio, does not begin to hold a flickering birthday cake candle to what happened in our Nation’s Capitol On January 6, 2021 when a mob egged on by this oligarch attacked, killing and injuring way too many…Now mostly ‘forgotten’ behind masks of righteousness, our cruel, feloniously convicted, and apparently soulless former President proclaims these murderers of police and civilians ‘heroes’ and in his tiny fragile mind he, will be King. Dead flowers, would be too good. 

“Life” seems so unfair, upright, with criminals proclaimed as heroes and all of us waiting for this fateful year’s November 5th. Every late summer breeze hints that early autumn will come no matter what. Just as seasons change, maybe there is hope waiting somewhere.
This first day of September I have more dead friends than live friends and now the big C hovers around our home close as a house fire at midnight, close as Sin, close as a fading dream cradled in your arms. There seem to be more cures for cancer than for auto immune diseases; what if you have both like Lupus and Cancer? 
I recently looked up crematories for future times and found a nearby one that was ok. Only trouble is I and the Albuquerque Fire Department went there once for ah, flaming smoke issues. I took pictures recording the somewhat gruesome scene for my popular Instagram page called, Abq On Scene). I would imagine they have fixed this situation as Google Reviews are fabulous.Too many questions with too few answers and I feel like I am dying faster than usual.

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An Epilogue of Sorts

It’s good to be king, if just for a while
It's good to be king of your own little town
Can I help it if I still dream time to time
It's good to be king and have your own way
Get a feeling of peace at the end of the day
It's good to be king, whatever it pays.

Tom Petty

I am and until my death will be THE KING OF BunnytownUSA.

Though In 1993 my wife and I bought a true to God fixer upper. We tried to add light to all we did, our first house was so deeply dark and scary and with drug dealers from The Back House coming and going 24/7 for our first year, when I was offered a RABBIT at my High School job, I accepted. Willie Wolfie Harvey Munchbutt aka Pedro Conejo, became the our first first rabbit/conejo. He lived in an old RCA TV cabinet. Not long after, he was joined by several adopted bunnies from the South Valley's Brown's Feed Store which ironically and downright cosmically, was across Rio Bravo Boulevard from an old church which many years later, my wife and I bought. 


We had rabbits in BunnytownUSA 1996-2021 when the last five adults died in a weird cross country Rabbit Virus just before THE Pandemic. It now holds ornate box turtles and a heated pond with a truly giant plecostomus and similarly large Oscar named Zappa. Bunnytown USA was written about in the Albuquerque Journal twice and seen on local television twice as well. Over the decades it became an origin point for my found art and light sculptures. Our backyard today is filled with light from a horridly dark place. And I was the Bunny God, named by a television journalist.

1995: When our fixer upper was more a house before becoming our home. 

Our home is near both Downtown and the Sunport alike and unlike some neighborhoods here, has many trees, mostly non-native elmwood that were planted by an early Mayor, Clyde Tingley. Little did he know that elm tree roots eat into your pipes and crack the crap out of sidewalks. What we bought was what we could afford. In 2024, our neighborhood is gentrifying and like everywhere else on the planet real estate costs are up since we bought our fixer upper, a large house with high ceilings and pitched roof. Maple flooring under many nailed down rugs. And for better or worse, so much more.

We bought this former literal ‘drug house’ with maple flooring under many nailed down on top of one another rugs. The backyard, what it was then, came with two outer buildings; we each have our own little studio. 

We moved in pets and all, two weeks after closing on our first home. I was a mid school teacher and teaching kids was THE easiest part of my day. My wife worked on a twin graduate degree in Movement Therapy and Modern Dance ; she would matriculate into aerial performance artist/instructor/partner- owner of the AirDance ArtSpace which she and I created from a 1930’s church building into an Aerial Dance Theater (2000-2021). We apparently love ‘old stuff’. This song lyric could have been written for us.

Comes a time when you're driftin'
Comes a time when you settle down
Oh, this old world keeps spinning round
It's a wonder tall trees ain't layin' down
There comes a time
You and I, we were captured
We took our souls and we flew away
We were right, we were giving
That's how we kept what we gave away

Neil Young

We Got Turtles ! 

2024: a more light-filled BunnytownUSA today.

Our performance theater, 2000-2021 in Albuquerque’s South Valley.

Tom Petty: born October 20, 1950, Gainesville, Florida—died October 2, 2017, Santa Monica, California

Miss you forever.

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Jeff Hartzer

© 2024

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