Wednesday, July 19, 2017

9751. RUDIMENTS, pt.17

RUDIMENTS, pt. 17
Making Cars
Wishing to read something? Try
this nugget I ran across today: 'For
while it's true that the unexamined
life is not worth living, it's also the
case that the unlived life is not worth
examining.' That's credited to some
guy named Robert McKee, from 1997.
All that may be true, and I like it, but at
the same time what a simple crock. I
had a friend once who disliked me, just
for the reason that I do all this writing
with only a junk-life to account for it.
His claim was (is) that I've done nothing
and achieved nothing, and therefore such
'nothing' is not worth a write. He may be
correct, but I still won't accept it. There's
too much inexplicable crud floating around
which people grab at  -  every other cause
and effect  -  to claim and make a part of
their own lives. I never do that, so I just
don't feel it applies to me, what he says.
The time I spent in NYCity, these tales I
relate, are like my own Iliad and Odyssey,
an oral tale told down the ages, except
here being written by me. I've got my
own version of the Gilgamesh quest.
-
Anyway, if a person had to wait for some
real, smashing life success to arrive before
doing anything over it, it would sure be an
even more crummy world than the one
we're left with. I always wondered how
cool it would have been to have had
George Washington and Aaron Burr
and Thomas Jefferson and all those
guys to have written a form of memoir
or recollection. They did nothing. What,
if any, they did write, even Thomas Paine,
probably the best of the bunch, was in
that stilted, formulaic, program-logic
thinking of the seventeenth and eighteenth
century. Plodding decrepitude, the plights
of history and the rights of man. Like it
mattered. It didn't, and it's boring and
painful to have to read. Thomas Jefferson
rewrote the New Testament, he figured,
by editing out everything except the words
of Jesus. How stark is that? I mean to say,
it's OK and all, and of course the words
of Jesus would be where the meat of the
New Testament is anyway, but still, excising
the extraneous stuff as superfluous? No
way. Like Springsteen or somebody said
about looking into the sun, 'But mama!
That's where the fun is!' Had any of those
guys (this is still what I myself used to
think, walking along, past all these older
and historic places marked in NYC where
this or that happened and this or that person
was), just inhabited a smidgen of the
modern, more abstracted personality and
approach or understanding, what a bunch
of great writing we'd have. As it is, we have
nothing by them of the real sights and sounds
of what they lived and felt and sensed. We now
get, instead, the closet-case documentarians
of pale politics and forced warfare telling
their stories for 3 million bucks just a few
years after they're spun from that web.
Nothing to show from it, no advancing
the cause of intellect or consciousness;
just instead the drab re-tellings of who did
what when and where while negotiating with
the Pulchama of Marachanba to re-fine the
floating value of the Pinda, the local
exchange currency of Winawabo province.
These people have no brains at all, and the
only thing they're advancing is the means of
extending the cage within which they've been
kept, and actually liking it, or thinking they do.
Which is where money comes in. The only
reason for the existence of money  -  let no
one tell you differently, and try they will   -
is to advance the servitude along. You end
up actually thinking you need it and just
keep wanting more. No one tells you.
-
I spent two good years with not a thing to my
name except the junk I could pick up or steal.
If there's no accounting for any of that than why
does it all keep resounding in my brain under the
rolling subtitles of 'write,' and 'record.' If I had
a fondness for anything, well, anything I'd feel 
like telling you about, you'd have heard it by now;
except that there' always more coming. Certain
portions of the streets I lived on, I owned them.
That's a declaration of intent, at least in this
telling. Inside a person's head,as I see it, there's
a Winter geography and a Summer geography,
and in either of those categories is a choice  -  
a very final choice because it then defines the
rest of one's days. Winter people versus Summer
people. New York City was all Winter people.
Just as I liked it. One time I bought a perfect,
tan colored, Winter, bare-trees, coffee mug;
for 25 cents, but no matter. It was perfect, as
by it's simple and direct graphic it captured
everything about me and the places I wished 
to be  -  there was a pattern of bare trees 
running all around the mug, the design 
motif. Just bare trees. So pleasing to me.
I'd visit home again, and there'd be mugs
saying 'Aruba' or 'Bahamas' or wherever, 
even one of the Disney places : sun and 
shore, happiness and sand, umbrellas 
and drinks. I could hardly not ever believe
that  -  a place of lawns :  Avenel, an old 
out of tune pianola of a swamp, with 
happy cups everywhere. Ugh!
-
I sure wished I was able to walk along, 
between two places like that, as it were, 
with any of those  old time Revolutionary 
War guys I mentioned before, but with them 
in their new guise of a completed cycle of 
psychological growth and literary maturity 
and abstract thinking. It was have amazed
me, always truly amazed me, I thought, to
have one of those guys along for the walk to
see with today's eyes and pen (keyboard,
whatever) what the world they'd begun had 
by now given back and become, or turned 
into. I don't think their sense of wonder,
frankly, would be able to extend or to stretch 
that far back into anything, forward or behind, 
to accept and absorb what's here today. 
Now that's worth a storyline, George.

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