March is a month of considerable frustration - it is so near spring and yet across a great deal of the country the weather is still so violent and changeable that outdoor activity in our yards seems light years away.
I started by hacking around the back yard in Richmond.
They all laughed. I drew their pictures and they asked for copies and I handed them out as if they were my tickets to the show. In the Navy Yard, I could drink with men because I worked with men; in the Parkview, I could drink with men because I drew their pictures. The world was a grand confusion. Finally, when I was bleary, when my hand wouldn't do what I wanted it to do, I went home. I would lie alone in the dark, feeling that I was a character in a story that had lost its plot.
I always had two or three jobs at the same time. I started doing yard work when I was 7 or 8. When I was 13, I got my first state job doing road construction. Between working, sports and school, I hardly ever had free time.
I absolutely fell in love with Moscow. It's one of those places where you can't help but trip over history at every turn. It's a city of enormous contradictions. Within a few yards of Lenin's Tomb is some of the most expensive shopping in the world.
A cook she certainly was, in the very bone and centre of her soul. Not a....turkey....in the barn-yard but looked grave when they saw her approaching, and seemed evidently to be reflecting on their latter end; and certain it was that she was always meditating on trussing, stuffing and roasting, to a degree that was calculated to inspire terror in any reflecting fowl living.
I think O.J. protests too much. Not only did he say he didn't carve the holiday turkey, but he was in the back yard practicing his golf swing the whole time.
The only way to win tournaments is with the short game. Over half your shots out here are within 30 or 40 yards. Ballstriking is where I'm trying to improve, yes, but more to eliminate big numbers than make birdies.
If people are a little nervous about approaching you at the market, it's good. I'm not Chuckles The Clown. Or Bozo. I don't cut the ribbon at the opening of markets. I don't stand next to the mayor. Hit your baseball into my yard, and you'll never see it again.
A man can gasp out his life beside you-and you feel none of it. Pity, Sympathy, sure-but you don't feel the pain. Your belly is whole and that's what counts. A half-yard away someone's world is snuffled out in roaring agony-and you feel nothing. That's the misery of the world.
I went out in my yard and saw a snake, so I got really scared, and I came back inside to get a shovel, and beat the hell out of that snake. Then I didn't have cable for a week.
You know, when I was a young boy I used to play baseball in my back yard or in the street with my brothers or the neighborhood kids. We used broken bats and plastic golf balls and played for hours and hours.
As he rounded the corner, he saw two dozen men, naked to the waist, digging a hole thirty yards square at the side of the path. For a moment he was baffled. It seemed to have no agricultural purpose; there was no more planting or ploughing to be done. Then he realized what it was. They were digging a mass grave. He thought of shouting an order to about turn or at least to avert their eyes, but they were almost on it, and some of them had already seen their burial place. The songs died on their lips and the air was reclaimed by the birds.
The idea of windmills conjures up pleasant images - of Holland and tulips, of rural America with windmill blades slowly turning, pumping water at the farm well ... But the windmills we are talking about today are not your grandmother's windmills. Each one is typically 100 yards tall, two stories taller than the Stature of Liberty, taller than a football field is long.
But we didn't, not in the moonlight, or by the phosphorescent lanterns of lightning bugs in your back yard, not beneath the constellations we couldn't see, let alone decipher, or in the dark glow that replaced the real darkness of night, a darkness already stolen from us, not with the skyline rising behind us while a city gradually decayed, not in the heat of summer while a Cold War raged, despite the freedom of youth and the license of first love-because of fate, karma, luck, what does it matter?-we made not doing it a wonder, and yet we didn't, we didn't, we never did.
For 'King Cole's American Salvage,' I rode around in the wrecker with a local driver and watched him deal with customers and hook up the cars. I watched the guy who tore apart the cars in the junkyard. I also wrote poems about those guys. I loved hanging around the yard.
I had formed a black movement, so I would speak for the Trotskyist movement and then walk about a hundred yards to where the black movement was speaking.
My personal philosophy is I'm running a 100-yard dash, and I haven't reached the end.
You know that when Irving puts the dog in the car, it is no longer in the yard. When Edna goes to church, her head goes with her. If Doug is in the house, he must have gone through some opening unless he was born there and never left. If Sheila is alive at 9 A.M. and is alive at 5 P.M., she was also alive at noon. Zebras in the wild never wear underwear. Opening a jar of a new brand of peanut butter will not vaporize the house. People never shove meat thermometers in their ears. A gerbil is smaller than Mt. Kilimanjaro.
I arrived at my hut in Beverly Hills just in time to keep real estate men from plotting off and selling my front yard. They will sell you anything or anybody's in the world as long as they can get a first payment... It used to be only Iowa that was out here but now they have three or four adjoining states interested and they are here, too. Real estate agents - you never saw as many in your life; they are as thick as bootleggers.
As far as I'm concerned ... the Universe is a junk yard, with everything overpriced. I am through poking around in the junk heaps, looking for bargains. Every so-called bargain ... has been connected by fine wires to a dynamite bouquet.
The great difficulty with large canvases is that they should by right be painted as fast as a sketch. By speed only can you gain an appearance of fleeting effect. But to paint a three yard canvas with the same dispatch as one of ten inches is well-nigh impossible.
One metric catches people. We prefer businesses that drown in cash. An example of a different business is construction equipment. You work hard all year and there is your profit sitting in the yard. We avoid businesses like that. We prefer those that can write us a check at the end of the year.
There isn't a ruler, a yard stick or a measuring tape in the entire world long enough to compute the strength and capabilities inside you.
There are times when I feel like I'm a traveling minister. I'm trying to go out and get kids to pick-up yard sale instruments and change the world.
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