Diary

Monday, February 28 (cont'd)

Brew made an iron-on transfer of Bryan Lamb's picture and Brenda put it on a T-shirt for him. Then she took a picture of him wearing the T-shirt.

The picture she took showed the T-shirt clearly, the B & B Feed & Seed gimme cap, and Brew's white beard, but his face was in shadow.

Brew thought it was very post-modern.

Layers within layers. Next she would take a picture of him wearing the T-shirt with the picture of him wearing the T-shirt on it, the picture above. Brew needed to get some more iron-on transfers before they could do that.

The first B in B & B is Byron. But the second B is Bubba.

Byron & Bubba's.

Brenda worked at the prison with Bubba. He was a plumber, but he quit to open a feed store in Wewahitchka because the inmates flushed things down the commode that made the toilets back up.

A plumber was one of the few trades an inmate could aggravate. A correctional officer could get back at them.

Brenda asked Brew to print out a picture of himself wearing his gimme cap and take it to Bubba. Brew said he would.

I Drive to Wewa.

Q: Do you see how your book is going to go?

A: Which book?

Q: This book.

A: Yes.

I'm going to write it in 21 days.

What to do with Bryan's art will run through the book like references to the Vincent Black Shadow run through Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

It will open with a book fair at Gulf Coast Community College and close with a book conference at Florida State University.

I will make side trips to Grayton Beach, Eileen West's gallery, and Woodie Long's gallery, then to Byron and Bubba's feed store, in Wewa.

One time Bubba asked me, "How do you like Atlanta?" and I said, "A lot of colored people up there."

Bubba said, "When a colored person dies in Georgia he doesn't go to Heaven, he goes to Atlanta."

You can't get away from colored people unless you move to Vermont, and it's too cold.

But you don't have to clean up their shit, either.

The blacks at the post office were glad to see Bukowski get out. But as long as he was there they would fuck with him, every night.

I got out of the industrial air-conditioner factory.

They're still there. Fucking with people.

In fact the people who fucked with me at the community behavioral health care center in DeFuniak Springs are still there, fucking with people.

I'm here, writing books.

Who won?

Dem?

Or me?

Q: Joe R. Lansdale wrote a story called "Bubba Ho-Tep." Elvis and the ghost of JFK in a nursing home fighting a soul-sucking Egyptian mummy. Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis played Elvis and JFK in the movie.

A: I saw it. It has its fans. The story, and the movie, had cult followings, and now, you can rent the DVD in any Blockbuster or Movie Gallery.

Bubba Ho-Tep inspired Bubba Po-Mo, a post-modern writer who has a cult following, the Buzzard Cult.

Q: I thought that was Art Brew.

A: Bubba Po-Mo is Art Brew's doppelgänger.

The Buzzard Cult were involved with ceremonial burial of the dead. Rituals and procedures. Calvin B. Jones took a copper breastplate out of a Buzzard Cult burial mound at Lake Jackson that had the long-nosed god on it. That came up from, or went down to, Central America.

Communication is always in duplex mode.

Messages travel in two directions at once along the same carrier.

I drew a logo for Suent Scientific that looked like a double helix.

That became the horizontal bm logo at bRIGHT mOMENTS. bRIGHT mOMENTS was a fiber-optic cable.

Q: Bright Moments was an album by blind multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

A: Yes, he could play two melodies at once.

That's what I'm talking about.

"Novel" and "Diary."