A collection by friends and family of Gordon’s history, writings, artwork and musings. There will be regular changes and updates, so please drop by as often as you like.

High station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling personal rejections are survived with grace.

He had lived in PATHOS, all his life, but he packed his bag and moved to POSSIBLE, a town known for Broadway try-outs, one of which inspired him to go to New York for the  promising new musical. Thrilled by the opening, he followed it on its road tour until the thing died in a town called NEVER. Finally returning to PATHOS, he planned to teach the dying town to like itself. But PATHOS had changed it’s name to STUBBORN, where he was finally crushed to death at a “Once In A Lifetime Sale” of badly executed garden figures, the likes of Sleepy, Doc, and a hardly recognizable Happy.

I’m waking up these days a Christian elder going to the lions, fleeing tangled sheets, pursuing giggling skittering slippers down a hollowed hall past mirrors making merry at the rumpled face, before it’s shown to the uninvited window washer in the half-baked sun, wielding his tools—while spitting crowds of encircling lions await the lamb, now groomed for the day, splashing his good morning in the frying pan of CNN.

The man of the house had almost brilliantly solved his chronic insomnia by conveniently advancing the role of the family’s young, comfy-looking Newfoundland female pup to the position of “pillow.” This way the master’s ear would be in constant receivership to the never-changing beat of the heart of man’s best friend. From home, mind you. Mainlanders with sleep problems would kill to have such grandeur.

Hers would be one beat master could count on. And—conveniently enough—this was neatly solved by the fact that the large, fluffy, special man’s BFF, too, in its wonderful way, enjoyed lying down a lot, sometimes squirming its way past when she’d have to be let out. And, timing her clock with her master, only required a small orchestral demand. Having said this, being master’s pillow came ever so close to providing her main reason for being. First and mainly, you got your steady heartbeat, which the non-sleeper could appreciate and follow along with to some extent. In another life, the two of them could be a Vaudeville act of some importance. That is, of course, if sleeping made up the heart of their main act.

However, in time, there appeared a bump to someone’s female self esteem, during a moment of scratching. She could barely remember her own name. “HER,” she thought it was, and what kind of a friggin’ name was that? This, plus a bit of rumbling in her familiar Newfoundlandese.

She tried slipping her bulk away from Master’s influence. What did she get from this habit?  Nothing noticeable. An extra bowl? Bullshit! She could get that anyway by sheer pushiness. No, no, this was something else. It probably struck her—over time—that she was being pummeled into shape for sleeping, and only sleeping. Yes! By God Rin-tin-tin!! Just like a damn PILLOW!!

Following a decent amount of  groaning—loud enough to off-set the world’s most reliable  heartbeat—she took to a lot more rumbling and tears enough to match that of a decent flood, drenching master to the point where Pillow found herself back in the children’s room, where as heartbeats go, theirs were the purest of all.

Where do you go to pay?
How long do you stay?
What if no one’s there?
Do you sit until they come?
What do we get for being stupid?
When is a wrong wrong enough?
Who do we face exactly?
Are there rocks to hide behind?
Who’s watching who’s more perfect?
Do we leave footprints on a cloud?
Or, are you up to your shorts in blasphemy?
Do you still wear shorts, or were they taken for evidence,
like your guns in Deadwood?
Will he or she take a joke or two?
And if one joke fails, do you try another,
or do you get that certain feeling
that the one about the cross-eyed Angel didn’t work,
or had they heard it?
And . . . what happened to my body bag?

Is this it for me
curs’t not to be
A writer of some magnitude
While sitting here and in the mood
All a-strain and all a-bloat
In tattered tam and ragged coat
And praying to whomever be
A goddess of such poetry
As I might claim a trifling share
Of fame and fashion if thoust care?
Do send me here
By cart, or sled, or nag or scow
(pray, bend an ear and hear me now)
One wee idea, word or rhyme
Or couplet, if you’ve got the time.
Stay not your power, quick, I pray,
Through either end would be okay!

Note:

Sadly, his plea would not be heard. He’d been seated in a badly constructed time-worn two-seater at a cliff side, which tumbled with himself in the throes of what would have been a record-writing fecal tsunami for future schoolbooks, as witnessed all too clearly by two-thirds of the town’s female population, who came tumbling after, not dissimilar to Alberta’s own buffalo jump.

He won’t know what hit him or where the car came from. When shoppers come running, he won’t see too clearly who look on him kindly to soften the blow.

In the half-minute left he’ll drop down through his years to revisit his genesis, down a dark street to a gel-lighted premises, sit himself down in a mouth-open attitude.

Shushed by a shadow he’ll sit and be good and he’ll see a one-acter—not bad, more than fair—and his dream will kick back to his twenty-first year when sooner than some he rose to his crest; yes he didn’t do badly we clearly attest.

And with whatever time in his suitable prime that he had on his timepiece in rhythm and rhyme, he made himself proud in his many personas for praisers and panners with old fading manners while playing the crowd.

And now send him off to his green room aloft. Have him look for a place with a lotta dead actors mouthing their lines who will mean him no harm. He’ll be scared to bejesus he’ll have to audition while bearing contrition as long as his arm.

Have him look for a place with a lotta dead actors learnin’ their words from plays full of morals—some heroes, some meanies with make-believe swords—and they’ll hear his old stories as stale as the hills—they might just as well—how he’d had some success since the time they were there but it wasn’t the same as it was with your peers when a story had heart in a sensitive year, and compassion, and yes, even devil-may-care, before he, let us say, kinda called it a day from a broadside on Bloor not far from the Bay.

First, THE IDEA didn’t know how it got there. It had somehow entered between his toes of choice, made its way up the leg—stopping briefly at the knee for a scratch, before climbing, masterfully, brazenly to an empty baby-cradle (oh, it’s his brain)—where it was born.

And then the world wanted him to share the idea—he, who had barely ever opened his mouth for  porridge!

“What was your idea?”  barked even the dog.

“I didn’t have the idea,” said he. “IT had me.”

The world had him repeat it. But not too fast. It was a marvel that he—who’d been called “brick-shit-house” all of his life—actually even HAD an idea. “Fancy that,” they all said, “just like . . .” No, they couldn’t think of another idea-getter  smart enough to say, “How’s your mother?”

Well, the listening world went as silent as Trump’s plugged-up mind in exile, as they continued watching the one member of the family with a grown-up tongue pack half-a-dozen liver pate sandwiches and  a bottle of  St. Emilion  ’67—which appeared as though it were summoned—and take himself on a much-deserved sabbatical.

And the tailgate banner on his leased out BMW said it all: “If I ask for directions, don’t tell me!”

Funny—and not a little unfortunate—no one really cares about an ingrown nail. If it could escape clipping, it might soon become clear that the only way out . . . is IN, like a neglected and futureless chorus girl wondering if there is life after ambition, and, in its travels within, after circumventing a trapped fart or two, it might stand a chance at romance with the highly rapacious Connie Colon, to name a few, and retiring finally amongst simply gardens of handsome curlies like itself!