I recently had an idea for a new piece that has its earliest genesis in the five years in my mid-to-late twenties, when I worked on a standardbred horse breeding farm. It comes from a memory somewhere in late 1996, when it was the last, clear moment of inspiration of my misspent youth, before so many things just started going so very, very wrong in my adult life. It was also whilst I was still completely wrapped up in the self-delusional bullshit exercise of trying to lock down my artistic side for several years, and, when that seems to not be going anywhere, have a dim-bulb, 40-watt so-called 'epiphany' that I should concentrate on my logical and scientific side instead, and summarily banish my so-called 'art phaggery'* to the slushy-mud, frostbitten-chains-doghouse.

The thing I remembered most about that day was that I came in to the ranch early one morning, and started my usual walk down the barn, turning on the lights, and I suddenly see a screech-owl perched in a small hole in the upper wall, next to one of the exhaust fans, giving me that always-unnerving, unblinking stare. When I put that day in the context of some sort of milepost of change in my life, I started thinking of it as 'Screech-Owl Corners'.

And it made me realise that certain late-life epiphanies also make this about the kind of perverse yet resigned hope that starts creeping in when you're maybe, just maybe, starting to see the far side of midlife crisis. Sometimes those late-adulthood/early old-man-hood epiphanies can be a real bitch. For us mere mortals, there's all the clichés of the red-sports-car-newer-model-with-plastic-boobs maybe fading into some Weekend-At-Bernie's sunset.

Like I said, at least for us mortals.
Now, take the example of a giant like Papa Hemingway, for instance, and who, like it or not, casts a shadow worthy of a skyscraper over American Literature, and there comes a day in the march towards the date with the Reaper, when he realises that that lazy tropical sunset will no longer suffice. He needs to go big, when he goes home.
Pamplona Bulls' Balls-to-the-wall, when Papa no longer had Paris (or Hadley Richardson), or when the aficionados of Sanfermines faded into Key West intermezzos (and Pauline Pfeiffer), and Cuba is lost to Martha Gellhorn, and all that is left is Mary Welsh...
and Ketchum...
A mere mortal like myself might have Screech-Owl Corners, but a giant like Papa will always have Ketchum.


*The term: 'Art-Phag', at least as I learned it back in the eighties was spelled that way because the particular artistic attitude it referred to was somewhat independent of the sexual orientation that tends to be lumped under the term 'fag'. Hence, one could be an 'art-phag' without necessarily being an 'art-fag' at the same time, but the two terms quite commonly overlapped, or even completely overlaid one another as well.