POETS Day and I’m Just Not Sure: Strickland Gillilan

There is a very valid theory that a party thrown at an appropriate party time is much less likely to be a really fun party as opposed to a party thrown at a time where responsibilities are in wait of being met and where guns are not properly locked up and everybody’s relationship is going to be fine, just fine. Mardi Gras is great, but expected. I’d bypass hundreds of thousands of favela denizens spending hours to display themselves on a lunar cycle dictated Tuesday in late winter for ten or eleven hangers on when you should have been writing a term paper that show up at a midweek early am hour with a few cases of Milwaukee’s Best and a dangerous facility with metric weights.

It’s the metric system and those that could barely measure the oregano needed for a Nigella recipe when out of their field of interest that brings me to this week’s POETS Day (Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday.) This time’s escape from work is from a strait out junkie.

That’s POETS Day. Get out of work and seize the weekend as early as you can.

He was really funny. Props where they need be.

His name was Chris and I worked with him in 98. He was at that point of drug weight loss were the bones were making their presence known and his skeletal profile was at a loss to find more body tissue to waste away. I haven’t seen him since so there is a whole generation of opportunity for him to have turned things around but my doubts are grounded and suspect the worst. He was.

But he was funny.

I remember one of my first nights as a fine dining waiter and I had this jackass customer braying and otherwise driving me crazy at a pace of four old fashions an hour. Later in my career I taught responsible liquor classes to staffs that needed an understanding of what booze can do to a person, but at the time I was twenty something and pissed that this degenerate with a poorly chosen tie was driving me so crazy.

I mentioned as much to Chris. He asked me, “Do you want me to cut back or put him down?”

Cut back meant giving him weak drinks. The other way… We put him down. That ass got double pours until he couldn’t walk and I helped his brother carry him to the car. I thought it was funny at the time, but I kinda feel bad about that, said from a twenty plus year retrospective view. Kinda. Still think he was a jackass.

The thing about Chris though, was that he ran the bar. Everyone answered to him. Bad habits and all, he ran the bar, strictly and well but in no sense that a regular and considered and measured person would. He once told me that everyone got a chance to call in drunk once. No kidding. He had rules. You had to be the first person on that given day to call in drunk. Any later caller was just an uncomfortable polyp on the restaurant’s dram shop liability insurance coverage because they choked on the Colgate and didn’t get their needlessly minty phone call in before the other contestant. That was his rule.

I keep thinking about how he would be now. Grouchy I’m assuming, but…

Still, that’s the Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday strategy for the week.

Call in drunk.

You negotiated a salary, right? You told your boss that you wanted dental and probably a chance to get crabs in Destin every so often and you said dollar value x and that was countered with dollar value y and then you all sat down and shared a blooming onion or some such. You made your time money.

In the great grand scheme of things, what is the dollar value of a Pinot Grigio fueled afternoon yelling at that bouffant thinking she’s actually going to get one over on Judge Judy.

Call in Drunk.

Let me know how it goes.

I want to make fun but that’s because by nature I’m cruel.

A fan of poetry is the best friend of a used book store. We can hope and pray that every thirty dollar tome is full of wonder but the best money is on the hunt and peck we do in used book stores.

I’ve wasted so much versus what I’ve discovered for a book pencil scribed $2.99 in the top left corner above a copyright.

I’m not saying used poetry books are surefire. I typically start at page eight and skip to page ninety and then depending on whether I’m a Christian or a Doors fan I go back to page twenty-seven or thirty-three (if you are both page thirty is cool) but I’m largely unsatisfied.

Most poetry books are unsatisfying, but that’s mining for you.

I’ve found so much. Rutger Hauer in the rain is my refrain.

This week I picked up Including Finningin by Strickland W Gillilan and I hate it.

It’s sing songy and I can’t get past the fourth line of any of the poems without a “What the ever living…” and then I get Germanic.

I have yet to find a single thing in this book that I care for, but that’s me. This guy was invited to speak at the White House twice. Granted it was both times by the lesser of the Roosevelts, but still, he was named Strickland and managed to avoid becoming a banker. I think that’s laudable.

I’ll spare you, and I keep flipping through the book to find a poem I could print and I keep saying no. It’s got an odd spacing issue on the cover. The two “N”in Finnegin are set up to look like “Fin nigin”

Teenager’s with college ruled composition notebooks and cool leather jackets don’t hold dominion over decent or decadent poetry and haven’t been able to hold pretense since Byron threw on a scarf, but we have backed the iambs into a corner. There is plenty of bad poetry.

Verse is wonderous, and as all things it gets experimented with but we have Diana Ross on our side. Music and poetry are always intertwined. We won’t lose the thread because Jeanne Terrell will save us.

Including Finnigin is a book put out by Strickland W. Gillilan, and he’s a poet. I’ve never done as much as he on that note. God Bless him. Seriously. He put himself out there and I’m in awe at the effort. It’s a leap of faith that requires not a scant of talent. I have a platform to review and comment on what this guy wrote, but the only reason I get to do that is because he dared. Salute to you Strickland, and thanks. I didn’t like it, but the fact that you did it. I like that immensely.

Why not.

The Unpopular Man

Strickland W. Gillilan (1869 – 1954)

Give me for friend the man whose friends are few;
Who, though his heart be clean and stanch and good —
Though every fibre of his soul be true —
Is tactless, blunt, and seldom understood.

In such a drift God oft conceals a lode
Whose richness makes Golconda’s wealth seem naught;
On such a one He ofttimes has bestowed
Large worth so hid it must be shrewdly sought.

So, while the rabble fawns on him whose friends
Are as the sands that rim the ocean’s blue,
I choose the best of all that heaven sends —
Give me for friend the man whose friends are few.

Apparently a lot of Strickland Gillilan’s writings have made their way into greeting cards. Not a nice thing to think about but Strickland Gillilan may have comforted your aunt in a mauve puffy envelope after her cat met a Cadillac.