November 20, 2015. A Tinker's Cuss – November 2015

It could be I'm just peeved from restless dreams last night. I was dreaming about Levon Helm again. Levon was a truth teller and we all know that. You get them every so often in the music industry and then everyone grows a beard, gets glasses and boots like they were a graphic designer and follows in behind. The ones who follow make all the cash. The guy in the front gets cancer and a weight on his shoulders.

Yesterday afternoon a young couple checked into this old Victorian-style boarding house where I am staying in New Jersey. He bore a close resemblance to Steve McQueen, must have been 28, and drove a '78 Corvette Stingray with plenty of rust and deeply sensuous headlights. Dirty blond hair and Peter Fonda sunglasses. His co-offender was a Guatemalan woman, about 19, sultry, beautiful and obviously difficult to please. Jet-black hair tumbled across her face and down her back.

In the middle of the night I was woken by sounds like a Panzer division moving into the forests around Stalingrad. There was a rhythm, a climb and a crescendo. I began to hear Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, but also recognised that Levon Helm was driving one of them tanks.

I slowly came to realise there was also a film crew in the hallway. I had a spiritual awakening when I grasped this was all about a remaking of Debbie Does Dallas. Yes, all synthetic, none of it real.

I felt very disappointed.

Here are some of the things that slut me to the very bottom of my ball bag and some that I love as well:

Critics who are merely wrecking balls. They are not Lester Bangs and they ain't Kenneth Tynan. "A neurosis is a secret that you don't know you are keeping." – K. Tynan.

Political Correctness. This is just one more way of stopping people from expressing themselves. The silent majority don't like being screamed at by internet bullies so they just make sure they vote.

I don't like a lot about social welfare because I believe it creates dependency. But I Love social welfare where it is truly needed. My mum and dad died with mere pennies to their name.

I detest the fact that many of our elderly go without because some bike gang is selling amphetamine and is on the dole at the same time.

Jail and imprisonment: There are some people who need to be locked up forever. Norman Mailer campaigned to get Jack Henry Abbott out of jail and then Abbott stabbed a waiter a month later. I've been to jail. I enjoyed it. We all laughed a lot.

If you are going to be a doctor, do it for Love and not a Maserati in the driveway.

I abhor commercial radio and commercial media because I believe it is helping to create an ever more unreal environment.

Methadone Clinics? I don't like them though I have met some very good souls within them.

I can't say I like people who take three or four pieces of hand luggage on commercial airlines.

It annoys me that one has to pay to visit Karl Marx's grave in London. But I've also read he was a spendthrift who put his missus through hell.

I despise liberals who promise to help and then just never return your telephone calls.

Punk Rock Music changed my life. The night I saw The Vauxhalls in the Mt Pleasant Community Centre Hall in Christchurch I was uplifted.

I don't see how anyone could write a book after Don Quixote but I'm glad a few people did: Thomas Pynchon, Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, W. Faulkner, F. Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy, Michel Houellebecq and Janet Frame.

I wish my dad had stood up. He's been dead for 35 years or more and I'm still waiting. I use his voice in the meantime.

Graham Brazier was a True Legend as was Daniel Keighley. Both men had huge hearts. They died for it.

It's hard to write from the heart. They kill people like that.

Lastly, I saw someone using a squeegee on car windows in the mist here in New Jersey the other morning. This guy was cleaning other peoples' windscreens and no one else would have known. I saw this as an act of Love and Faith. Try it, it works.

As John Adams said: "The proper time to influence the character of a child is about a hundred years before he is born."

That's wisdom whereas I am just a fool.