{"id":830,"date":"2015-07-06T20:48:01","date_gmt":"2015-07-06T20:48:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/?p=830"},"modified":"2015-07-06T20:48:01","modified_gmt":"2015-07-06T20:48:01","slug":"i-was-trying-to-remember","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/?p=830","title":{"rendered":"I was trying to remember…"},"content":{"rendered":"

a Ken Kesey title, took a few minutes to come to me out of the fog. It was Sometimes a Great Notion<\/em>. And I was thinking of the pranksters and the Further<\/em> bus and Cassady flipping hammers with his eyes all wild and Marty Feldman – this is walking to the station Sunday a.m. to buy a coffee from the girls still half-asleep, half-hidden behind cellophaned croissants and the humming milk-froth machines, must get a copy of Young Frankenstein<\/em>, see if it holds up – and that book title struck me as odd and at once I understood that I’d done this before, some other year, some other morning walk for coffee, yeah it’s a lyric and then I got Goodnight, Irene<\/em> and Lead Belly and the line,<\/p>\n

Sometimes I have a great notion<\/p>\n

To jump into the river and drown.<\/p>\n

And that’ll get you into American roots and blues and from there you might get to Charlie Poole and If the River was Whiskey<\/em> and another great line,<\/p>\n

I looked down the road just as far as I could see<\/p>\n

A man had my woman and the blues had me.<\/p>\n

So I got it playing on my phone speaker, in my shirt pocket, for the walk back over the track, clutching my styrofoam coffee cup, a fine drizzle, spooking the early-bird tourists here to park in the gravel yards around the station, marvelling at the low grey clouds. Cassady died of exposure walking down a railway track. Just set off walking into the Mexican night in his beat jeans and white t-shirt, like he didn’t care if he got anywhere. He’d had enough of the pranksters and the San Fran scene. The Grateful Dead played their last ever concert yesterday. Ferlinghetti’s still giving interviews, the rest are gone. The roads keep coming and then they’re gone. And I was thinking, do people still read Sometimes a Great Notion<\/em>, do they have the time for 700 pages of Oregon angst? But I can’t answer that. All I can do is order a copy when I get home, and hold fast. Hold fast and step on.<\/p>\n

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a Ken Kesey title, took a few minutes to come to me out of the fog. It was Sometimes a Great Notion. And I was thinking of the pranksters and the Further bus and Cassady flipping hammers with his eyes all wild and Marty Feldman – this is walking to the station Sunday a.m. to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-henry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=830"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":832,"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830\/revisions\/832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=830"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=830"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrybrook.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=830"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}