I watched her rise and fall over our sleepy little town. That dead rock in the sky, that shines over us all… Who knows the secrets here? Where? Where everyone pretends that nothing happens.

The warm salt waters of the Gulf Stream flow north from Mexico, along the eastern continental shelf, passed Cape Breton and beyond. Cold arctic air sweeps down over frozen tundra and bristles raised hairs on hunched backs, along Labrador and into the Northumberland Strait. Where these 2 meet is a spit of land that rises out of the Atlantic, just north of New York City, and is formerly known as New Scotland. It’s because of this; the north winds and the south currents that the conversations here are usually always about the weather…

To an outsider, it would appear as if nothing else goes on here but the weather. However, appearances are deceiving. Nothing is as it seems…

Reminds me of the old joke… A man from the city asks a fisherman, “What do you do around here for excitement.”

The fisherman smiles, ” In the summertime we fish and we fuck. In the winter, we don’t fish. “

The north coast of Nova Scotia is somewhere between the middle of nowhere and God’s country.

Somehow, I was still there when I was 18, and she’d been dead for 7 years. I would still look for her whenever I was in a crowd of people. Straining searching. Imagining that she had faked her death to get away from me. My mother. By the fall of 1977, I guess I figured she was really dead. All of this I kept to myself. Winding wrapped tight. In my tiny bedroom on a twin bed in a mobile trailer on an acre of land at the edge of Deception River is where the nightmare began…

I ripped out the window screen at the foot of the bed one night and the screen at the head of the bed the next. Screaming some nonsensical rage about “I’ll get you! You motherfuckers!” The next morning the fingernails were torn and bloodied from ripping out screens. Both windows smashed.

I could hear the breathing coming from something somewhere. I held my breath and lay still on my bed, making sure it wasn’t me. I looked under the bed and under the trailer. Nothing. I was alone… except for whatever was breathing. It felt like it was coming from inside me. I had never been so terrified. I forgot to pray. I forgot God.

After a few days and nights of this, I realized that I had to leave that bed, that bedroom,that trailer, that acre, that river.

I left and never returned…

I was looking for a lover.

Who could love me without guilt.

It started out so hopeful.

But shame had that house built.

I couldn’t get my feet set.

My eyes were never dry.

I gave it all. I’m standing tall.

No who or when or why.

I tried to be a humanist.

I just never found that grove.

All that whining at the get-go.

Had to bounce and bust a move.

I tried things less than spiritual.

More like carnal, some call lust.

Perhaps a search, a thing called love.

I just couldn’t find the trust.

All this searching has a fortune.

Maybe one that’s hard to see.

Down a path I wouldn’t recommend.

Some things you can’t unsee.

I’ve been listening to the masses.

They be trying to bring me down.

I’ve been taking master classes.

Ever since the blues dropped into town.

They are talking about oppression.

Like, it’s shiny and brand new.

So much horror in that lesson.

That ironic cake to chew.

They are raging, eyes are blurry.

Tears they fall like April rain.

Going nowhere in such a hurry.

Like they just discovered pain.

I’ve been looking for a chorus. That won’t break us into songs. Maybe something just to bore us. Take our rights back from the wrongs…

I remembered everything dramatic until I didn’t. I let that shit go, which is a monumental gift.

However, I  remember certain individuals from my childhood who, at the time, I thought were unreasonably cruel. Now I realize they were just human. Nothing more or less. So, to those people that I criticized on the eastcoast!,

“All Apologies!”

It isn’t that they don’t tell the truth. This much is evident and expected after you accept them for what they are…

The problem with liars is how comfortable they become with the lie. Like skin or breathing. It’s all second nature…

Once you reach the plateau of acceptance and understanding of the second nature of the liar; enough time has passed with that individual that conversation is futile.

Silence and distance are the only reasonable solutions…

My 92 years old Aunt Joan described her parents’ generation as being not tactile.

Tactile is a word that I don’t think I’ve ever heard before. However, I knew instinctively that my grandparents were not very touchy-feely.

Joan raised her kids with a consciousness towards being much more tactile, and from what I have seen from her daughter, the proof is in the results: her daughter, my cousin Maria, is warm and lovely. A small sample size, I know…

I was raised in the wonderfully warm environment of children should be seen and not heard or as I grew to know it as the less than tactile– shutthefuckupera.com

The morning that Vincent was shot, he placed a large order of painting supplies.

Mysteriously, the gun that shot him was nowhere to be found and was not recovered.

The authorities or anyone else who accepted the suicide narrative have never considered how a man who had trouble feeding himself could afford a gun.

And finally… a deathbed confession in the early 1960s by the last of 3 brothers who admitted that Vincent was shot accidentally by him and his siblings during a favorite pass time of their’s, of teasing and torturing Vincent when they were teenagers.

As a side note: Vincent didn’t cut off his ear and give it to a prostitute either. There is an actual police report filed by Paul Gaughan, who was the only witness as well as a master swordsman… Besides being a wonderful painter and a world-class arsehole, it is considered a known conclusion by those who have studied the police report that Gaughan undoubtedly cut off Vincent’s ear.