The Games of Night, Jim Harrison

I admit it, sometimes I dream in Harrison and when I wake from dreams that sometime resemble pages from a Harrison Novel I often have to fight off a shudder of sadness. Not because the experience has dragged my subconscious through some narcoleptic trauma. No I shudder at the reality that no matter how blessed a life I am leading here in this southern diorama of semi rugged culture, which I adore, there still abides in me some headish zoonotic emotion of woe or forlorn melancholy brought on by the deprivation of the fulfillment of certain childhood dreams. Harrison does this to me. Some times during full moons they, the dreams, are stronger and dominate my thoughts long into the day. Sad that from such a romantic dazzling light seems to come a permeating layer of wet cold vapor like concrete that slams upon my soul and seals the sound of my soulcry in mid voice drowning out all possibilities. Possibilities that the childhood expectations of a now 55 year old semi mature child are null and void and will never be. I live on as usual and play the game of adulthood as many like me do occasionally looking in the mirror for the other one, the one that accompanies me ( Machado ) for advice, but nothing. Realistically I do not deserve the right to indulge in such sullen, contrary, selfish thought but it only comes around once in a full moon and this one has doubled up on the invisible pressure that makes me a bit unstable and pushes me to produce this rambling train of pure self serving dribble. I long for what will never be again here on this earth, those of you who know me will courteously allow me my refrain and those who don't? Well, I know your puzzled at this point but I still wish you well. I miss my Dad, the old days, the old ways, I miss the dreams we concocted, I miss others as well and their voices and I dearly miss my young soul being happy with the dreams of adventure to come, a life full of it. I woke up this morning early enough to watch the sun slowly light up the hall way in our place. I think I was dreaming about him. I always have dreamed good dreams about him since he died. The last time I saw him he was dressed in a clean white t shirt tucked into clean white boxers unceremoniously laid out on a cold slab of concrete in a shack with no roof in a Catholic Cemetery in Tapachula Mexico. He had been dead for almost two days when finally his bloody clothes had been taken off him by undertakers that came 500 miles from some other little Mexican town to embalm him cause there were no embalmers there in that little town, they had cleaned him up and dressed him as he was, then burned his clothes, they lay smoldering on the ground in the corner, the smoke wafting up through the open rafters. I kissed him on his scared swollen forehead and told him that I love him as I do, but that's another story, for some other long full moon night.
Recently I was interviewed by a fine gentleman that writes a blog called, "The Sporting Life", good reading and I believe he shows a lot of Class with what he does! Another gentleman posted a comment on the interview saying something like, he enjoyed the thing for the most part and thought that he and I had a lot in common, could relate to each other except, he had issues with my statement that I didn't believe in Global Warming, Seriously McGee, Wow! he wrote. I thought a while on this. You sir, you would choose Global Warming as the culprit that negates a possible friendship, or just becoming an acquaintance even, on the web no less. This day and time I need substance from people, grit, blood, blisters, strong hand shakes, the look of integrety in a mans eye! I need not, any further shallowness around me, I need not, those that you can easily see to the bottom of their wells, enough said.

Mr. Jim Harrison, he brought all this on, all his words that I feel as I move my eyes across them and that full moon of course. So here are a few lines from "The Games of Night" from his latest Novellas collection entitled, "The Farmer's Daughter". 140 proof Harrison, over all a very good read.

Nestor was acclaimed as a boy who hunted jaguars and began to get occasional jobs guiding rich hunters but he was still often hungry. One of his hunters killed a female black bear and Nestor fed a remaining cub goat's milk but one winter day when he was cold and hungry he killed the cub and roasted it. When Nestor told me this he began weeping and we walked back to his pickup. On the ride back to camp he said that by the time he was eighteen he knew he was himself becoming a wild animal so he married Celia. He said that he feared someone would mistake him for a lobo and shoot him.