The Sandman

Oh hello and welcome back to the lounge, uh wait, nobodies ever here but that's okay we are not in this for glory or money or anything really, we are in it to entertain ourselves and why the fuck am i speaking in the plural? who knows? anyway like a good book that you just had to put down for awhile i have somehow gotten the itch back, maybe it's the lack of quality programming on the telly, maybe it's my new record player, maybe it's i'm cold and don't feel like leaving the house unless i have to but whatever reason it's back and so i might as well scratch it...

You see i've been threatening for years to delve into the heart of the Wilderness Years and it's about damn time i got around to it dontcha think? So as long as i can remain relatively sober enough to type and string some coherent thoughts together i'm going to let loose with all the beauty and horror of the life and times of the North Oakland Player,  a boy with a plan, a mountain of student loans and a way to get rid of said loans, now i know you're sitting there, both of my readers that is, and you're saying to yourself, how fucking interesting is that going to be? Well now there are always interesting characters when you begin to step outside the lines of the law, it's inhabited by paranoid freaks and weirdos and wastoids and what starts as a simple plan to pay off some loans and still be able to eat morphs into something altogether different than what our hero set out to do, i mean what's a boy to do when he discovers that his only real talent (other than maybe his jump shot) is hustling? He runs with it that's what...

And so in the coming days and weeks and months we'll find out how and why, find out how the kid known as the NOP became the King of North Oakland or as he was more commonly known El Kono, of course along the way we'll take some diversions of course, hell i got one right now ready to go for tonight if i get real inspired but hey let's not get to far ahead of ourselves now right? there i go again...

And so we start with that song above, a fitting start to the story i believe, a story about staring into the void and saying fuck it? what have i got to loose? of course by the end our hero had a lot to loose not the least of which was his ass but for now we'll start with this song, I came to Morphine (the band) around the same time i dropped out of grad school and was much better for it, i was lucky enough to see them three times and actually caught them a few months before Mark Sandman died onstage in Italy, of course some of this has been gone over before but like Bukowski i reserve the right to repeat myself ad nauseam, you remember the little post about Mary Jane? the stripper? seeing her at this show? me being on a heroic dose of mushrooms, a dose the that just kept getting bigger and bigger as i kept stuffing dust into my mouth throughout the show? a brilliant show by the way and i'm still wondering how Furious and I got home that fine day but i do remember being in my local and passing out more shrooms to anyone who wanted them including the bartender, a fine night indeed...

Morphine was also a favorite among us boys at the Fry Hut and i distinctly remember dropping acid one night and having a grand time listening to this band while i smiled at the tourists and served up fresh, hot boardwalk fries, i often wondered if any of them caught on to the fact that the crew behind the counter, in front of all those fryers, was high as a fucking kite most of the time, on any number of things, of course there were only a few of us brave enough or dumb enough to drop acid while working and of course i was one of them, hell i was like the captain of the Chemical Crew, a nickname given to my crew by our boss for the amount of partying we did on the job, maybe the best boss i ever had by the way, laughed about how fucked up i'd be when i got to work and was amazed at how well i worked once there, i remember him telling me that if i actually came to work straight he might make me get stoned or shotgun beers just so i'd be alright... but enough of this onward and upward and here's to the exciting conclusion of the Wilderness Years, however long it may take...