9960. RUDIMENTS, pt. 79

RUDIMENTS, pt. 79

Making Cars

I always thought you could go

crazy bit by bit, over the course

of your entire life, or do it all at

once and get it over with by at-once

re-defining everything.  In school

I always liked how they told us,

biologically and chemically and all,

how things were always 'held in

suspension.' What ever it meant,

it was a cool concept, and I followed

it through to Life itself. (It was also

pretty curious to hear, because all the

'bad guys' in school were always getting

'suspended'). Lives are always mixes,

and things are held in suspension,

maybe even sometimes in suspense too.

But, suspension suits it better  -  you hold

things aloft, balance them top them into

other things, suspends their elements, and

then they break out here and there, in pieces

and dips, out of other things. The suspension

breaks down a little, the components start

dripping and breaking out. Very cool concept.

If you do this all at once it turns out to be

a lot easier because things aren't yet so

heavily engrained. (Your 'suspension' is

looser). You can only exist by 'being' in it -

all of life, the entirety. There were those,

I'd notice, who went just so far, and then

stopped. And that was their life, and that

became unsatisfactory to me. Like, for

instance  -  and only because it worked

out that way  -  those seminary years for

me, and the same for anyone who got all

enmeshed in religion or their church stuff;

if you follow those dictates correctly you're

going to end up nowhere at all, because they

stop, they constrict, the proper outlet of what

should be a life. A life should be everything,

not just the supposed perfection of some small,

little, self-induced quadrant of the 'rules and

regulations' of someone else's dictates. Maybe

this is difficult to understand or maybe I'm

not explaining myself too good, but I found

that life had a lot of dead ends  -  dead ends

that you wouldn't even know about or realize

because you'd be thinking you were doing

right and perfecting your silly little quadrant.

Like being a crossing guard in a prison

filled with death row inmates. Get hit by

a car and killed? So what and who'd care?

-

So I went the whole hog route, and I took it

pretty good. Highway to hell and all the rest.

Some part of me says I may be a reformed

thief, but the thief part is still there. Indelible

stain, and original sin, combined. Mark of

Cain, whatever. I saw a lot of that  -  I saw

a lot of just plain evil people. Down at the

lower east side and all those broken down

streets and people I frequented, there was a

lot of dead meat down there; men with the

death-stare oozing. Out in the willy-nillies

of rural Pennsylvania, there too I'd see it.

Whether it was inbreeding or just pure hate,

I saw guys who'd twist the head off a goat

if they had to (Edie had goats too, right

next to old Lloyd Perry's personal slaughter

house). Some farmers were just perfect and

trim and proper, real Christian Pennsylvanians,

and others just weren't that at all. It ran both

sides of a left-lane highway, and that's not

even counting when I got mixed up with

Bikers and motorcycle gang guys. There was

a concentrated 'suspension' in all this of lines

and theories to be crossed and actualized

into the lives that people actually lived.

There were fights over stuff I couldn't

even fathom. This was before all that

stupid cops and  blue-line stuff, when

being an outlaw biker meant, at immediate

first-blush, that you already were facing

police problems because of what you

wore  -   club colors and insignias,

symbols and the rest. Cops and the

task-force guys, they'd set out for rounding

people up for what was on their back, the

flags they flew, what they wore. And

Bikers did it too, to each other, like now,

same, tattoos and Bloods and Crips and

all that crap. Now, thirty years later,

the stupid cops, having taken a page

from the Bikers, have their own flag

and somehow get away with flying it

-  a distorted version of the regular

American flag, in black and blue. If a

Biker had done that, he'd have been locked

up. Now there are schools and churches

and everything else dedicating entryways

and flags and windows  to 'Supporting' our

men in blue. What kind of message is that

for kids? 'Cop Lives Matter,' is one I saw

today, in the doorway of some school.

That's propaganda. That's indoctrination.

You know what, and you can take it

from me, no lives matter.

-

When I got to New York, in 1967, it was

still that most cops were Irish. It was an

Irish fiefdom, sort of. If your father was

a cop O'Malley, you probably ended up one

too. It started changing not long after that,

the ethnic mixes  -  Frank Serpico kind of

stuff  -  Eye-talians busting in and becoming

cops. Now it's all over the place  -  Asians,

blacks, Latinos, women, I see cops of every

possible amalgam of national identity. I guess

it works, but they all seem pretty stupid, like

character actors (bad ones) more than cops.

Two hundred years before, funny thing, the

law enforcement scene in fragmentary 

NYCity was a jungle. There were two 

competing police forces, one controlled 

from Albany and the other from City Hall  

-  like the 'Metropolitans' versus the 

'Municipal Police Force.' It was more 

politics than anything, (Albany lost),

power and Tammany corruption, turf 

and buying votes and all that. These two

forces hated each other, forget the local 

crime scene, which enforcement was done 

anyway by the local gangs, who didn't

'need no police forces' to keep their own 

kind of order. The two police forces 

themselves were like armed, rival gangs,

always pumping off each other, fights, turfwar

and police riots. The only reason they mostly

got their start as Irish was because after the

Municipals won out and policed NYC, the

ultra-corrupt Tammany Hall people would 

stand at dockside and pick people right off 

the boats for the jobs they wanted  -  muscle, 

lunkhead and brawn: "c'mer buddy, we're 

givin' you  job and makin' you a copper." 

So, all that Irish potato immigration stuff 

got us an Irish fighting force of NY Police.

 Much the same happened with the 500

(seemingly) fire-fighting forces; they too

banged heads and beat the shit out of each 

other over who got to what fire first. 

Many documented instances exist of 

homes and businesses burning to the 

ground, and people dying, while two 

firefighting forces fought it out in the 

street while the damned place burned 

down. That's some suspension for you.

-

When  you watch a movie or a film or 

whatever, there's something called 

'Suspension of Disbelief.' It's necessary 

to have (I do NOT have it, and therefore 

cannot watch any movie, successfully)

in order to go along with the plot  -  

where usually there are just too many 

pat and coincidental things that happen 

so the plot can work. (That car showing 

up just at that moment, the pack of 

cigarettes being there on that counter, 

that cop being under the window just 

at that moment, the drawer being

 unlocked and 'just having' that

gun in it, etc.). You're supposed to

'suspend' your 'disbelief' in order to 

allow the plot and the director to carry 

you along, even with the sometimes 

outlandishly perfect and coincidental 

things. That's another sort of 'suspension,' 

of course, yes, but right here it works 

perfectly to get across a connection

to my original  premise. Just like in the

movies : see what I mean? You

gotta' be crazy.