What I Need

What I need; 22 and nothing to do, is a big cigar and a nice cold beer. I'll sit out on the porch with John Fahey in the backround and a little Hemingway to read and observe the pleasantries, (if there are any) in the neighborhood at night.
Every night, or very near it, when I go to bed I lay awake for several minutes, and in that time it almost always happens that I hear a siren sound off somewhere in the distance of proximity of my part of the town. The siren goes off, and then the neighborhood dogs begin the howling. There must be nearly eight or ten of those howling goddamn dogs. Part of me laughs and part of me sighs.
Ahh, but I'm not to that part yet, and while I'm still fooling around with the present ol' John Fahey's guitar is a-whalin' away and I am taken aback at such a splendurous sound. If you ever come across it the next time you go music shopping, I suggest picking up his later album titled, "Old Fashioned Love" for it is well worth the twelve or thirteen dollars you may spend. It is at once lively and romantic and sad and honest and rivers and meadows of chords flood the ears with pleasurable tone.
If I can't have a cigar then I'll settle for a Camel. I've gone full circle again; until recently I hadn't been smoking camel's for nearly a year. Maybe thats a lie... Who could know if not me? Or care, for that matter, I suppose.
What I need to do is get rid of all my excess I see cluttered about me. I hate having things I never use. One day, sure, but not right now. I don't mind bare walls and the bare essentials to get me by. Keeps things simple and easy and I know what I'm doing most all of the time.
I'm so glad to be reading Hemingway again; it has been quite a while and since renewing my taste I wonder how it was I went without him in the first place. I'm not certain, but I feel as if I could confidently say that he is my favorite novelist. I love the way he always talks about the meals wherever he goes and how people feel about the ordinary things. I wish I could have known him in the time when he was my age. Then I would be in Paris maybe, and see the great city along with him and go to the tracks with he and Hadley and maybe even discuss books with he and Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company. That would have been much nicer than a carpentry job in a middleweight, sleeping town of only fifty-thousand or so in the southern part of the middle of the country. We can't pick our battles, we can only choose how to fight them.

I'll get on that good foot again and soon it will be high times with lovely people and drinks and dancing and all the good things I used to be so fond of, and that were fond of me also.

-Charlie