The best pocket in pants is the fifth one. I think at first it was a
watch pocket, or for three, maybe four bullets (two shot gun shells), or a lucky rock if you didn’t have the money for a gun or a watch. Change is too hard to get out and easily forgotten. Want a nice old Wheat Cent or a Buffalo Nickel? You know where to look.

There were these French jeans that has six pockets, the sixth being
a lipstick pocket. There were embroidered back pockets number one and two in a fetching “lift and separate” style, and no front pockets
at all, only the lipstick one concealed at the belt line. So the pockets went one, two,and six.

Poor three, four, and five. Well that’s too bad, but what would they have held. really, in that ultra-low rise cut.

I just think everybody needs a pocket for their lucky rock.

by – Doug Mathewson

The first summer I didn’t go back home I worked at a farm stand
near Agusta. Things were different down there in what was
south for me. Back home was so far north what we got on tv was all in French. The sign out front said “Farm Fresh & Native Grown”. Like all kids we made fun of people who came and went. There was this guy, drove up, wanted to know if the grapefruit was locally grown. Claude La Croix, he was from up north too, shakes his head a little and says “no sir, been a bad year for grapefruit around here, these came from New Hampshire.”
We laughed later, I still laugh now. Back home lying was a sin,
but we weren’t back home.

by – Doug Mathewson

I read a wonderful very short story by Allen Woodman involving a man who was the former proprietor of a flea Circus. I never saw a flea circus, they seem to havebeen a low cost entertainment option of the Great Depression. I started wondering about parallels between flea circuses and larger, more traditional circuses with all their romance and glamor. Not so much the sanitized shows that still tour, but something earlier from fifty or more years ago.
Is there a flea circus museum or a hall of fame? Perhaps galleries devoted to the artwork? Maybe, but I did not research any of it. Then I thought, “where would a flea circus winter?” Maybe Florida or Southern California as others did. Images of sleepy tigers under palm trees and trapeze artists riding elephants to the beach came to mind. But truth was probably the ringmasters arm pit as he slept his way south in a boxcar. The sets and costumes packed away in his cardboard suitcase. He would get winter work in the fields or groves, rehearsing the acts at night knowing he was just as circus as the rest.
I can not imagine there was much money in any of this, but people got by and found satisfaction in living less restricted lives than the norm. There won’t be a major motion picture about flea circuses or a new theme park in their honor. Even though I can picture the merchandising so well.
Maybe Disney’s nanotechnology will bring a more hygienically acceptable revival and then you can take the kids.

by – Doug Mathewson

It is not baloney. It is a meat rollup. Like the fruit rollups you get at school only differant. The two four year old girls, who’s combined age is closer to thirty, look at me with open secptisism. How will it sound when they rat me out? I think with ketsup they’ll go for it.

by – Doug Mathewson

 

Call it baggage, ones emotions.
Experiences, disappointments, and pain.
Trim it down to fit a carry on, no more.
Keep only the basics.
Enough to fuck you up for a few days.
Nothing long term.
Rush down the ramp.
Be first for the airport carousel.
Grab one at random.
How different would it really be?                                                                     

                                                               by – Doug Mathewson

I knew a girl for awhile who’s dad was a butcher. He worked different chain grocery stores around Boise over the years. He drank real hard and regular. Wether this made him restless or his restless ways kept him drinking, I don’t know. He moved from job to job as time went on, as he and his knives wore down. I thought then that a drunk with a cleaver was bad medicine for sure.
The girl moved on too, restless like her dad, so I never made the seven hour trip to Boise to meet her folks.
Somebody said she works for the phone company, but I don’t know for sure.

by – Doug Mathewson

I read about a millionaire who had his hair cut everyday. He had a barber’s chair from the old Confederate Congress Building in Richmond Virginia installed right in his house. I thought it odd, him being a black man and buying that chair, but I guess history is history, or maybe it’s an investment. But it did make me think of Buddy Bevan.

His dad, who was even balder than Buddy “Onion” Bevan, would come into Tifton on Friday afternoons to get drunk and have a haircut. Old Man Bevan, I don’t recall his christian name, was a big man who overflowed the barber’s old chair. He breathed slow and heavy while his eyes went in and out of focus.

It was a dollar and twenty five cents for a haircut then, but he grew up with the barber and came every week so for him only a buck. Buddy said it was only a dollar because it was a shit job done on a drunkard with no hair. I have to wonder what happened to that old chair.

by Doug Mathewson

The Owl and the Pussycat disdained the sea
They chose waters more secluded and calm
“We want a life more private,” said he,
More time for each other, they did agree
“An outboard perhaps, no oars to interfere”
“No rude-rude Evinrude with all it’s nasty noise” said she
“Worry not, my dearest one,
We shall putt-putt along with a little Yamaha”
The punt boat was made genteel in this way
Giving them more time to spoon in their quiet hidden bay

by Doug Mathewson

The older shipyards of Amsterdam shelter from the Northern Sea in the southwest corner of the old harbor. Ship building moved to ports with cheaper labor years ago. Royal Haskoning Maritime and the others only do repairs and maintenance on older deep water craft. Sailors had a funny song, a part of which said “In Amsterdam, they say, all barnacles will fall away”.

Men and women accumulate so many barnacles as we rush and gush along, as we plod and stumble through our many days. One by one these cirripede crustaceans find us, gaining weight and mass. They drag upon us, making us stutter and finally stall. Movement becomes no longer possible. Can Amsterdam make them fall away? Hashish for barnacles of the mind. Prostitution for barnacles of the body. The beauty of the city itself and it’s people for barnacles of the soul.

But what of the ones that cling the very tightest, the barnacles that grip my heart? Amsterdam can do nothing for these. They may only be loosened in my lovers arms. On that day, all barnacles will fall away, and we shall swim anew playful and sleek, like eels through the salt grasses under the summers fullest moon.

by – Doug Mathewson