first came to Paradise Valley in the year 1973.
He came here to eat fried chicken steak
and to dream about Japanese women’s feet,
and ended-up buying himself a 40-acre ranch
close to where Hemingway once liked to fish.
The ranch consisted of a large 2-story house,
a log-cabin built shortly after the Civil War
and converted into a guest bedroom, and a
big ole red barn where Brautigan kept his typewriter.
There was an empty chicken coop and lots and lots of thistles.
Not to mention several abandoned automobiles
which often served as makeshift day-beds.
Brautigan lost himself a lot of friends whilst in Paradise Valley.
For those were the years which he spent hanging-out with the movie-stars.
The years in which he began to drink a little too much a little too often.
But his was not a rapid freefall into bitter alcoholism and abject paranoia.
And this is not the home in which he eventually killed himself.
Brautigan lived a looney-tune life of
self-imposed semi-isolation out on the ranch.
When he was depressed, he liked to
read a biography of William Faulkner.
When he got bored, he liked to sit at the
kitchen table with his point-22 calibre rifle,
and shoot-up telephones, televisions, bath-tubs,
pinball-machines, kitchen clocks and any
other inanimate objects that he could find.
The poet Aeschylus died when an eagle accidentally
dropped a tortoise upon his head. Brautigan was not so lucky.
He had to take matters into his own hands. Much like Sylvia Plath.
Though his choice of weapon was Smith & Wesson handgun
borrowed from a Chinaman, rather than a kitchen oven.
On the day Brautigan left Paradise Valley for the last time,
he presented his good friend, the author Thomas McGuane
with a funeral urn wrapped-up in a blanket.
He told McGuane that he’d send instructions
about exactly when the item would be needed.
If The Big Goof had lived, he would’ve been 75 years old this year.
As it was, his long-legged corpse was discovered
in California on the evening of October the 26th, 1984.
It is speculated that his body may have lain undiscovered for as long as 6 weeks.
The note which he left behind contained
the following 3 words; “Messy, isn't it".
Brautigan reads 'All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace'
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