"Drifting on a sea of forgotten teardrops"

"Christmas"
Continued...

Dear ones, last evening I watched the concert, 12/12/12, in Madison Square Garden.

When Roger and Pete (The Who) did the last song, "A Cup of Tea", I finally broke, I cried and cried. My lung cancer has returned. I have 4 to 6 mths to live, give or take a song or a drawing. So now, as before, I will tell you, Randy will soon rest, the price I have paid in lost freedom, lost family, lost love and overwhelming sorrow and pain. My careless selfishness.

Someone had to be this person. Someone had to have every opportunity, "Nessun dorma", and yet fail at every one of the endeavors taken.

I have been the wild haired young man. I have been the sinner of ages. "Wild is the Wind". Silently and out of reach, I stroll to the end of all of my hopes, all of the dreams of a skinny little Indiana boy.

The night of John Lennon's death, I was the sole proprietor and bartender of a small bar in Encinitas, CA.

I spent the whole night on a 3 mirrored stage and played my acoustic guitar. No one was there but Yoko, and I cried and cried and sang my heart out for the icon of my youth, so carelessly slaughtered, we marched for peace, bell bottom blues and all Mr Lennon meant to me. Somehow I knew I had run to the beach of San Diego, not to succeed but to pretend. I wanted to go where my mind could not find me!

To leave the poets, writers, artists, dictators, monsters of capital and motivation.

We have brilliant amazing technology, but no more brilliant or amazing than the wide eyed wonder of the boy from free cloud. I was so angry. I could not connect, I come from a history of appalling dysfunction, and yet the story is there. Roman Jones in West Philadelphia and Gary Schmitt. John Rumbel in California, Gregg Martin in CA.

So much documentation, songs and dreams. Everywhere I went I made music and sorrow.

Women: Tierney, Penny, Theresa, Kay, Janet, Marti, Marya "Mars", Barbara, Ruthie, Rene, Karen, Katya, Valerie, Ziggy, Devin, Linda, and all of the beautiful women, I can't remember all their names, and yet it's those memories and those experiences who kept me, lifted me above my own madness. I have decided that this blog will NOT have sexual stories. No, because the girls and women who loved me and gave comfort to me. Sunshine the beautiful blonde girl who kept me for a month at her beach house in Florida. I had been severely beaten. She saw me in a phone booth, a scared, angry, purpled, bruised 16 year old boy, and she stopped her car and took me to her home and loved me and loved me. So many of these true stories and yes, there were men too. The women, however, healed me, seared and bound my wounded heart and gave me strength to go on. This girl Sunshine in St Petersburg Fla in 1972. I was "On the Road" w/ Nietzsche and Rilke, and Proust.

You are my life, you are my death, you are not here, but you are never gone. As you said, we were them, they were us. I won't say their names or the baby's name. If I keep it in our hearts, mayhap we will get another chance? All the years of this life, I could never love another. You were the murderer, I forgive you, mother. All the hope, success, peace and love, I pushed up into you hard, can you forgive me? I think of the baby, to this day still, your innocence gone. Your heart in tears. Forgive me, woman, I could not forgive myself. But believe me, I am so sorry, Karen. Until then. Goodbye. I love you.

Marvin Randall Chaplin
1956-2013

[part of this is written over a drawing of a blue-eyed blonde woman]

People say I'm crazy, doin' what I'm -

Go round and round, I really love to watch them roll.