Scroll of Jawns / Ep. 11
jawn /jôn/ noun - (chiefly in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area) used to refer to a thing, place, person, or event that one need not or cannot give a specific name to. Jawn is a neutral, all-purpose noun used to reference any person, place, situation, or object. In casual conversation, it takes the place of the word ‘thing’.
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jawn one.
My hair in the front is thinning out pretty fast. I look in the mirror, see my scalp at times; it’s yet another surreal reminder that I am dying. I’m determined not to give much of a damn about it but I suspect that is easier said than done. It’s just that I don’t want to be one of those guys whose head looks Frankenstein’d with hair plugs or shoe polish or whatever. Fuck that. Losing my hair in my 50’s seems fair enough/ honestly. I mean, I’ve outlived a lot of guys born right alongside me. I’ve dodged the same sorts of deaths that claimed many other fellows. Fate took some of them long before they ever got to be where I am now. Thinning hair seems to me a toll I ought to pay willingly. Dumb looking hair/ unsexy man scalp moon mountain sun burnt George Coztanza bowling ball. I don’t care what anybody thinks or says. Whatever this is: I’ve earned it.
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jawn two.
Speaking of the Lady in Black, death moves at her own pace, of course, slow rolling along on the backs of shadows/ trash truck clinger on the bumpers of all those grinding long lost days gone by. The real time poetry of passing time is tough to appreciate mostly because our brains are the asshole of organs. They lie outright to us, make us think that everything is fine/ that there’s a lot of time left and what will we do with it all, you know? Our wildly complex human minds have over-adapted to the blinking neon of our impending demises by bewitching us into thinking about just about anything else. Car payments, college football, politics on Facebook: dumb shit that invades our thoughts without mercy. That’s uncool when the truth of the matter is probably that yesterday my hair was lush and my skin was tight and now everything is slipping off my bones because it wants to be on the ground. My smile/ my memories/ all my selfish foolish plans/ they’re all trying to leap out of me/ desperate to slip back into the soul of a planet rather than this shell of a man. Look at me now! I’m a burning apartment above some midtown tavern, happy hour smoke rolling out of my face, Last call on my lips. But hey, I’ll fight it ‘til I can’t no more. It’s savage and epic, this strange ride back down. Most people seem hellbent on never addressing their own deathy shit but I think that’s kind of lame. I tell myself that I don’t want to miss anything. You can weep bittersweet at a lot of endings in this life, I say, but you’ll never taste tears like the ones that woke you up. But I talk a lot of shit too, I guess. So maybe just figure it out for yourself.
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