Reunions
Dunkin donuts
Thursday, August 21st, 2025. Last night I watched the Devo documentary on Netflix, and it was very good. Happy to see that they’re all getting together or getting along at least in front of the camera. I was a long-time devotee of Devo, so much so that my brother wrote it on the basement blackboard in the house we grew up “John is a noted devotee.”
So I was thinking of reunions. Specifically, the 20-year reunion for my high school, someplace in East Rutherford. I did not enjoy it, although I was pretty much wired from various substances.I had cash and hired a car to drive me there and drive me back, and the driver sat in the parking lot while I was inside getting wasted.
Talking to people that I hadn’t seen in 20 years and realizing that I never want to see them again. But two guys that I wanted to see were not there, Jim Carley and John Nesselt. Jim died in 97 while jogging, and John is who knows where, but now it’s been 45 years, and I haven’t seen him, and that’s much too much time to reestablish any connection, and like I said, I never want to see these other people that I graduated with ever again. Unless it’s a family reunion, I just don’t want to know.
Online there is some noise about a documentary on Maxwell’s, of which I do not plan to take part. It’s just not my thing, I suppose. Fallon’s arranging it or putting it out there and it’s been published in Variety and a few other online publications and they’re looking for photos and stories.
I have notebooks of when I worked there, but looking back at those notebooks a few years ago, i.e., 12 years ago, it’s all about me looking for drugs, hanging out with Julio, and describing the atmosphere around me, not very entertaining for somebody that’s not me I suppose I guess.
This morning I had an encounter at Dunkin’ Donuts. Not a pleasant encounter. Each day, I get a receipt, and on that receipt is a code that I enter to take a brief survey and submit for a free donut the next day. Today I went to not my usual spot but a spot where I think they were nicer.
But they were not nicer since they were insisting that the QR code on my phone was a screenshot when is directly in an email I spent too much time trying to describe that so much so that I was flustered and left my free donut there and walked out. I have written some nasty reviews, not nasty per se, but detailed messages about some horrible person who challenges is my authority, how dare she! First world problems, I reckon that’s all I got.
Bill did not get home until 1:30, by which time I was fast asleep. The previews begin tomorrow for his play, Postal Madness, not his play, but the play that he is in. He has not acted in a play in a number of years, and now he is. Mike has been helping out with the lines, for which Bill has been very grateful.
Ghostface Killah is expected in a few hours. Ghostface was charming.
Whatever happened to that wardrobe resident, David Kitchens?
Gemini AI rewrite like an Allen Ginsburg poem
### A Postcard from Another World
O, brother of the blackboard,
Scribbled prophecy in chalk,
**”John is a noted devotee,”**
Echoing in the cellar’s throat,
A mantra for the years to come,
A vision of the future-past.
Devo documentary on a Thursday eve,
A flickered reunion on a screen,
Netflix hymns for the fallen god,
And the brothers, getting along, or pretending,
For the rolling eye of the camera,
For the ghost of the basement blackboard.
—
And the thought of **reunions**,
Like a bad acid trip returning!
A twenty-year haunt in East Rutherford,
A gymnasium of regret,
My wired head buzzing with chemicals,
A hired car waiting in the lot,
The driver, a sphinx in the night,
Watching me stumble from one stranger to another,
Faces I once knew, now ghosts,
Whispering their forgettable lives,
And my gut screaming **”Never again!**”
—
The two I wanted to see,
Gone, vanished.
**Jim Carley**, a name in the paper,
Fallen on a jogging path in ’97,
A final breath in the morning dew,
And **John Nesselt**,
Lost to the vast, indifferent nowhere,
Forty-five years of silence,
Too much time to bridge the chasm,
To pull a rope across the void,
A chasm that swallows old friends,
And makes the rest of them strangers.
—
And the **Maxwell’s documentary**,
A new circus for the old clowns,
Fallon’s ghost in the gears,
A siren call for stories and photos,
Published in Variety, in the digital haze,
And I, a keeper of notebooks,
Filled with scribbled-out lives,
Of Julio and the search for a score,
A pharmacopeia of memories,
A selfish diary of a selfish past,
Not for public consumption, I suppose.
—
This morning, the **Dunkin’ Donuts** dance,
A ritual of frustration and free donuts,
A QR code, a screenshot lie,
The woman behind the counter, a gatekeeper of sugar,
Challenging my authority,
The digital proof on my phone,
An email sent from the heavens,
A flustered exit, a forgotten free donut,
Leaving a taste of anger on the tongue,
A detailed, nasty review,
My small rebellion against the machine,
**First world problems**, a mantra for the modern man.
—
Bill, a ghost in the small hours,
Returning at 1:30 AM,
Sleeping, I heard his quiet return,
And now, his play, **Postal Madness**,
The first preview tomorrow,
A new life on the boards,
Lines rehearsed with Mike,
A brotherly, grateful grace,
And soon, the arrival of **Ghostface Killah**,
A charming specter in the city’s heart.
And what of **David Kitchens**, the wardrobe resident?
Did he too, dissolve into the air,
Like the memory of a free donut,
Lost in the strange and fleeting morning?