Wordblog

My words, my noise from the Celebration of Life for my friend Martin Borycki...

I wrote these notes a few days ago in hope that I'd have something prepared  for today. I guess we'll find out together if that has become so.

It happened that it was Jack Kerouac's birthday.
Like our friend, Kerouac was a poet, a painter, a writer, an American take on a Zen Buddhist with attitude and quite probably certifiably insane.

My friend, our friend, Martin, was all those things and so much more.... he was a multi-instrumentalist, playing keyboards, stringed instruments, wind instruments, percussion and any number of children's toys that might happen to squeak, or rattle or jingle or hum.
He wrote and played beautiful music. Music that pushed boundaries and challenged the listener to pay attention and to keep up. His music often fills my home and comforts my mind with it's depth, it's completeness, it's utter disdain for convention and it's timeless beauty. I play it often and loudly and I always marvel that these ideas – these crazy ass, mind fuck ideas could find flight. I love his music. If I go back to the beginning I recall a party in Crescent Beach many, many years ago, some of you would have been there... I recall Martin, perched on a windowsill in a bedroom smaller than a shoebox – all of us crowded around while Martin held court with a big ass hollow body electric. Big and bold and belting out some made up on the spot Cowboy Jazz Afro Swing thing that in so many ways showed Martin in his glory.

He was a painter. I have some of his art. His paintings hang proudly and patiently our our walls. None of it is easy, though some of it is very simple. There are complex pieces and troubled pieces – noisy and aggressive and bold. Mostly though, they're intoxicating, and touching and telling and always Martin.

He was an 'Apple devote' – a hot off the press first user, an early adapter to any and all software or hardware that might happen upon the market – especially so if it helped him compose music, or make art, or manipulate reality.

He was a writer. He was a writer of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of words. Some of his words sit upon my shelves waiting patiently for me to re-read the work. Screen plays and skits, musings and ramblings. Funny and silly and ridiculous and cleaver and thoughtful and sometimes so very, very sad. I have often commented to co-workers and associates – because I work with writers every day, that I've never encountered a writer that understood so clearly the mechanics of a story - the eb and flow of characters and plot and outcome. But of course he was a writer more complete than just the mechanics because he had the passion and the conviction and need to to tell his stories. He wrote well – he wrote fantastically and by that I mean he could not only spin a yarn, but he could spin it from straw. He could command the sentence and the paragraph it belonged to, and together they told the stories Martin needed to tell. Fury though and marked with wrath that you might suggest an edit, or a change of phrase, or development of plot. No way. No how. Not gonna happen. For back up I'll turn to Kevin for support knowing full well he'll stand along side me in this.

I recall so clearly, even all these years later, a very young Kevin and a very young Martin joining me in the studios at CJAZ to record some of the silliest, most outrageous advertising copy ever recorded. In fact, it was within those recording sessions that our friendship began. I still have the Master Recordings of that first collection of comic material.

He was a lover.
Please don't confuse this with 'he was a good partner', I can't imagine the kind of patience that would have required, but he was a lover.
Sometimes it could drive you crazy... all that love stuff. Insects, and rocks and the sky and all that.... but of all the things he loved - of all of them, and I am proud to say that I was one of those things, at the top, at the very top of the list were his beautiful daughters. Make no mistake girls that in your father's eyes there was no greater thing. There never was, there never could have been anything ever that shone more brightly, that he spoke of so endearingly, that so captured his heart nor soothed his soul so completely as you three. For whatever trouble, or mishap or turbulence you may have endured with your father, I can assure you that it was always you. I was shown every photograph, I heard of every accomplishment, heard of all the trials and the terrors and what I saw time and time again in his tales and his telling's but mostly in his face and from his heart, was the love – that special and complete love that he had for you. This I know to be absolute because it was so plainly so.

For me though, the thing that I will miss the most, is the laughter – Holy fuck how we laughed together. Great uproarious belly laughs – line after line of heavenly heartfelt laughter. Had we been so lucky as to grow old together we would have had to don our super absorbent man-diapers for every meeting. A Guinness, a Jamison's and piss your pants laughing. That's what we did best.

We quarreled near the end. Differences of opinion, the booze, business, honor and position. But we were coming 'round to something... we had to, we went back too far.

Earlier I mentioned that the first draft of this jumble of words began – well, in my head it's been brewing for weeks of course, but in earnest, it began a few days ago on Kerouac's birthday and so I thought it fitting to close this bit of mush I've cobbled together with better and perhaps truer words than I could ever muster. So listen up Martin – I think Jack wrote this one for you;

The world you see is just a movie in your mind.
Rocks don't see it.
Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.
Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you’re already
in heaven now.
That’s the story.
That’s the message.
Nobody understands it,
nobody listens, they’re
all running around like chickens with heads cut
off.
I will try to teach it but it will
be in vain, s’why I’ll
end up in a shack
praying and being
cool and singing
by my woodstove
making pancakes.