take it away, ella

there is an old tape i have of ella fitzgerald and louie armstrong singing together.
when louie finishes his part and ella is about to sing, he goes: take it away, ella!
i love that so much and have never understood what that saying really means: take what away?
it just reminds me of seeing something in front of you and shamelessly grasping for it and literally taking it away. i think the english saying is "to grasp the mantle". in german it's "die gelegenheit beim schopf greifen" which is much nicer than the mantle, because "schopf" is hair, meaning "grasp the hair", as if chance was a long haired girl passing by. grasp it! take it away!
sometimes a sky is full of chance.
a cloud.
a lousy little cigarette somewhere in the open. that's what's nice about cigarettes. they draw you to the windows or the streets. and everything's still for a moment. just that smoke coming in and out of your mouth like the weather, the seasons, a clock, a misty memory. the weather! what a phenomenon. a lightening chiseled a piece of brick off my house the other day.
the sea is full of chance. jeeez: getting in that hell of a water with all the frightening living creatures and slippery fish down there in the dark. i love it and fear it. slimy stuff. wuuuu. tang. clan.
my broken toilet two weeks ago had a chance in its crack. it made the handyman come to repair it who ended up telling me the story of his lost love because of his lack of balls. he married the wrong woman and ended up having two kids with her who were already grown up and had their own kids by now. and his real love, who wears glasses, lives alone and was kind of waiting, but now it's too late the handyman said, because her heart has shrunken like a raisin of sadness and in the age things get stiffer and more neurotic.
thought that the other day when i looked a woman on the street straight in the face with all the craziness inscribed: it was indeed kind of stiff, painstruck, as if panic had drawn its picture right in the muscles between her eyebrows leaving two wrinkly, indicating lines behind like traces.
i wonder what lunacy will inscribe in my face. guess it's already there and just my blind spot.
can't get the pictures of somalia out of my head. syria. norway. london. japan.
my tax declaration still on the desk. banal, vain thoughts in the jiggling jumble of my mind. schizophrenic, quotidian mess. take it away, ella.