Some People I Wish I Could Just Sit Around And Bullshit With Today

I was thinking about some people I kind of miss not having the chance to sit around and shoot the shit with.  Some of them are people I haven't seen or talked to for a very long time; others are just people I don't see or get to talk to frequently enough.  There is no particular significance to the order of these and the list is far from complete.

1.  Dave Twedt.  Dave is a Montana boy who lives in France.  The last time I talked to him was on the phone - from France - about ten or twelve years ago.  He was drunk.  I hadn't talked to him for probably ten years before that.  When I was in Little League I met Dave; he was from Rudyard and he struck me out on 3 pitches in the All Star game which for some reason was held at Tiber dam near Lake Francis by Valier.  I had never seen a decent curve ball before.  Later we ended up in college together; we had mutual friends from Rudyard and Big Sandy.  Once we raced our cars across the Higgins bridge going like 70 mph to get to the Stockman's Bar.  When we got there we all jumped out and Twedt started insisting that everybody take their shoes off.  I love talking to him.

2.  Clyde Brandt.  Twedt's pal from Rudyard.  Also knew him in college.  He was hilarious and a very fast typist and a very fast bullshitter and a thinking man's thinker.  I think he might be around Havre now; Tester runs into him sometimes.  He always entertained me; I haven't talked to him in probably 30 years.

3.  Jane Cooper.  I don't remember where she was from.  I knew her in college; we called her "Super Cooper" and then when birds mysteriously started shitting on her head whenever she walked around campus I started calling her "Pooper Cooper".  A woman always on the edge.  She had red hair and it's been my experience that if you are a woman with long red hair, birds like to shit on your head.  She was a barrel of laughs and then some.  Last saw her in about 1979.

4. Rod Bramlette.  Rod was from Fort Benton, another college friend - and a good friend.  He had a lot of health problems and I believe he died not long after we got out of college.  He had one of the best attitudes about life I ever saw.  It wasn't what you might think, like some Brian Piccolo Hallmark Channel bullshit.  Rod just gave everybody hell as a matter of course - an equal opportunity sort of thing.  Everybody. Rod literally attacked life; he dared it to mess with him.  He was so obnoxious and rambunctious and hell bent, he was probably the purest spirit I ever knew.  I really loved the guy.  He was one of a kind.  I wish he was around now so I could talk trash to him and then write stories about whatever he said back.  My Big Sandy girlfriend at the time (see later on this list) called him a "sawed off rabbit".  He was about 5'4".  There are a million things I could say about Bramlette that would epitomize his spirit.  Here's just one example: we were standing around watching an intramural softball game, and somebody came up and innocently said, "Hey Bramlette, who's winning?".  Instead of just telling them, Bramlette spit snoose on the ground and said, "What do I look like, a fucking scoreboard?".  From him, with his presence and his delivery, this was like the funniest thing I ever heard.  Also, Spanish class caused him physical pain which was also pretty funny.  Ask Mark Dunlap about him - he was amazing. I wish he was here right now.

5.  Randy Cline. I picked on Cline mercilessly in grade school and high school and I had a lot of help.  He had the deck stacked against him in a lot of ways but he was no quitter.  Still isn't.  He has accomplished a lot in his life that I hope he is proud of - he should be.  I'm glad to have him as a friend.  He's a sharp guy and I like to banter with him.  He gets the best of me sometimes and I like that.

6.  Michael Townsend.  A talented musician, a quick wit, a master of sarcasm and absurdism and irony.  We made each other laugh.  Together we wrote the classic song, "The Ballad of Baker and Stroup" about two bumbling serial killers who made their mark in Montana in the late 1960s.  He is a free spirit and a unique individual, and those are things I really value in a friend.

7.  My dad, Dana Sibra.  He has been gone now for about 17 years but his image is still sharp in my brain. I wish there would have been some way to really tell him what he meant to me, but he really wasn't that kind of a guy.  Almost every day I think of something, some historical question or some other bit of knowledge that I lack, and I think, "I wish I could ask Dana, he would know that."

8.  Sheila Jenkins, my first real girlfriend.  I haven't talked to her since Homecoming 1985 and then only briefly - that was years after we parted ways.  She never comes back to Big Sandy any more but every five years I hope that I will see her at Homecoming.  I loved her mind.  The sardonic freedom and absurdity of her thought processes were so didactic. She was a profound influence on how I think, how I write, etc., even though we were just kids.  I would love to talk to her about stuff.  Intellectually, she challenged me spiritually - and vice versa.  I don't think she ever knew that.  Probably now she wouldn't care.  But she was a kick in the ass to toss around snide remarks with.

9.  Bo Blazek.  I saw him at Homecoming this summer for the first time in awhile.  Bo is another person who is very unique and a very free spirited force.  He is naively and harmlessly iconoclastic.  And he invented the one man fast break, one of the most amazing spectacles in high school sports history.

10.  Dave Densberger, aka "The Worm".  A college friend; he was from Peoria, Illinois.  He was never afraid to be himself, even if he had to make himself up.  Crucifyingly extroverted.  Perhaps the most complex, dedicated and overtly stupendous self parody I have ever known.  He could go around hopping on one foot, spouting his catch phrase of "Yeah, yeah, motherfucker!" and strumming air guitar and make it seem profound, inspiring and hilarious.  Another inimitable personality; unforgettable and impossible to describe if you didn't know him.  He is a cop in St. Louis now I think.  This is like the greatest joke on us all that I can imagine.  I miss him too.

11.  Roberta Edwards.  Yes, Berta, you make the list.  You are refreshing, unpredictable (and maddeningly predictable at the same time); challenging, frustrating, high maintenance, brilliant and inspirational in a very unique and ass backwards sort of way.  Come to Seattle for a few days so we can hang around Starbucks making up facts and other shit, drinking coffee and proving to the innocent people who work there that I am not the only one this maladjusted and weird that can lay claim to a Big Sandy backstory.

Enough for now.  There are more and I find this is a little bit refreshingly cathartic.  I will do this again.

SOOT

As soon as I win the Powerball I'm going to build a big house and live in the chimney.  Just in the chimney.  I'm never going to come out.


I will build an extra fireplace and when you visit you can stay in that chimney.  It would be too tight for both of us in one chimney.  And that would defeat the purpose.


Ah yes, the purpose.  The purpose is guidance, and reliability on guidance.


If I'm in the chimney I can't be somewhere getting into trouble, somewhere masking off crime scenes, somewhere herding empty beer cans with a leaf blower, somewhere wiping up the dog pee, somewhere obtaining photographic evidence of the last surviving chimera on the planet, somewhere listening to Melanie screech about her skate key and her candles in the rain.


You get the idea.


In my chimney (and only if I have had the presence of mind to build some fires before I move in), in my chimney if I really contort and bend I can eventually lift up my arm from along my side and get my hand up by my face, and from there I can scratch a message in the soot.  I can read the message (in the dark?) and know that I am still there.  It will be very painful to get the hand in position but the passing of information is serious business and some suffering should be involved.


I can't eat in my chimney so I guess I will die.  Probably it won't take very long either.  I guess if I do that then eventually my body with shrivel and twist and become smaller and even more eventually, it will decline into bones and fall in a noisy pile at the bottom of the chimney.


While I'm in my chimney I won't be able to spend the rest of my Powerball winnings.  If I have invested wisely I will have a lot of money when I die, or at least by the time they find my bones.


As soon as I win the Powerball I'm going to buy the tallest tree on earth and climb it and live at the top with only a slingshot and green suspenders.  The suspenders are for comfort.


The slingshot is for shooting out the newsy eye of the cameras that will come.