Speak speak, Author author

 This friend of mine who died unexpectedly a couple years ago was a writer.  A real writer, he had published a book about the environment https://www.amazon.com/Signals-Heartland-Tony-Fitzpatrick/dp/0802712606 and worked as a science writer at Washington University in St Louis.  He also had a couple novels, and a bunch of short stories.  He got a few of the short stories published in minor magazines but he had no success in shopping them to publishers.

He had a about a dozen short stories taken from his experience growing up, together they would make a slim book, and I remembered urging him to self publish it.  It would be distributed to his friends and it would be around, maybe exchanged, maybe part of some estate sale, who knows where it would go, but it would be around and maybe somebody would pick it up out of idle curiosity, and maybe it would become a hot best seller and made into a movie staring the Brad Pitt of the day.  Well probably not that, but just the idea of somebody reading it maybe a hundred years from now, just tripping along with the words you wrote, well that would be something.  So maybe Beagles has accomplished something like that, and I salute him. 

Beagles sent me one of the cassette tapes maybe ten years ago, and I had to dig through my archives to find a tape player but I found a tape player and listened to it a few times.  I didn't recognize the voice, but then I hadn't heard Beagles speak in fifty years and he would have been still a teenager then.  But also there is a singing voice that is different than the speaking voice, and all and all, not bad at all.

1994 I see and I was thinking that was not that long ago, I was working for the state then and two years into my condo.  But this October I will have lived in my condo for thirty years come October, so that makes it 28 years ago which any way you look at it is a long time.

I remember that Beagles left Blissfest when it changed its playlist from folk to pop including that awful rock and roll.  And these songs are certainly folkie.  Listening to Manitou Waltz  I remembered that there was a reveal in it and then I recalled that the ladykiller was a baby, but then the talk went to lettuce and I thought maybe I was mistaken and he was some kind of gerbil although how that would work out on a dance floor I don't know, and then it turned out that it was a toddler after all.  But I have to ask shouldn't it have been ice cream or cake or something, or did lettuce just work into the rhyme thing?  

But I quibble.  My own goal in my little taste of fame at my openings when I am a pretty big frog in an awfully tiny pond is I get to talk about my paintings, you know just why I did this and how I did that, and folks stand around and pay attention.  Of course I know that I can't go beyond five minutes without losing most of my crowd, but that's okay.

So I wonder if Beagles wants to partake of his five minutes of fame and give us a little spiel of how and why he did this and that.