May 18 2020 Viral Times

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Early one morning in the merry month of May.
 
Yesterday was today then when it was the present. Thinking about Marcel Proust remembering .

 The old saying was - The past is another country. I am 75 years old most of my life is in the rear view mirror.

  The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain though I only have heard that I wanted to go to Barcelona .

  I had a free ticket and a place to stay and a free ticket to Berlin as well. But the government refused to refused to give me a passport.

  I was a flight risk I might not come back. I was in debt . When was this?  In the past century the 20th century do you remember

  the past at all is the past just like a dream? Not quite like a dream but dream like says - Franky Gaard rhymes with hard.  

  No I will not go quiet into that good night or any night as the night is magic, the night is easy on the eyes and so lovely and dark. 
  
  When the virus came the streets were the same but the people were all in their houses or cabins or dreams. 
   
  Now they opened the bars in Wisconsin but the border to Canada remains closed up Highway 61 to freedom.

  The whole world is dying the oceans are crying. But that’s only part of the story most of it is dreadful & gory.
  
   In art school days I fancied myself a poet but just briefly I could see that pictures were me and poesy was not my axe.

   But I started to read philosophy and something in that agreed with me. On Telegraph Avenue I first read Nietzsche.

   In Oakland sweet Oakland on the way to my fate I hopped on a bus and made a sweet date. I met my friend Peter

   at the gallery by chance and he was so happy he almost did dance. A check in his hand and sales on his mind the

   Vietnam war was a bonanza so fine. He laughed and he gestured and laughed like a fool as happy as ————.

    He just got such a kick out of selling his paintings which we quite autre as they say in Francais. 
   
    Yes a bad poet and a bad philosopher but I put it all together in pictures and words. I was a very wordy man.

     It was a gift from my mother who talked all the time and then their was father who hid his great crime.

     But what l had learned about the past was that it just doesn’t last it moves and it moves and it never sits still,

     and the I remembered sitting on a hill. It was in San Francisco in 1981 when I learned that my girl friend was

     over and done. She’d made a mistake . Or was it me? But the bay was so pretty and I was so gay that all it

     remember is the sunshine that day. 
     
     Now I think , I paint , I draw and I love my sweet Pam. We live in a cottage with a bower in back . With a dog

     named Bobby and our dreams are intact. I am still a bad poet and I talk and I quack and I wake in the morning

     with the same sore back. My philosophy suffers from pictures I make and I dream of a future a day and at a time,

     and I wish that I could remember what was my crime.

     My dream was pictures of faces and things in colors and words I would sing. But this old dark world is now

     in a pickle as the old dark fellow has come with his sickle to cull out the weak the poor and the sick and empty

     the prisons  and send all of the old folks off to the sticks, the blacks and the browns the hungry the poor are

     just getting lost in the rush , it’s all about money it always was the was this damn world is on that same bus.

      To Berkeley to Berkeley to find me some art and that was then and that was my start.  

 

 

 

   
 

 

 

   

 

Pam and Frank in masks photos from Pamela’s iPhone. Masks made by Pam at home with Robert Zimmerman our 7 month old puppy.
Pamela and Frank Gaard 5780