9967. RUDIMENTS, pt. 81

RUDIMENTS, PT. 81

Making Cars

There are vast regional differences,

things this country tries to cover up with

some overly-glamoured idea of oneness or

sameness, all that 'takes a village' kind of

groupthink. It's pretty sickening to me. It's 

been underway now a good twenty five 

years at least, brought to you by the same

lugubrious characters who give you medical

clinics, warnings for check-ups and syndromes

and readings of your personal levels of this

and that. The same kind of people who give

you schools and rules, sell real estate, stuff 

like that : gift of gab people with no foundation 

at all. To be seen at church on Sunday, if, just,

to maybe make a buck by the visibility. To

rule by example is a real crock, it's still

ruling, and the example sucks.

-

When I was in NY City, and a person broke 

ranks or got out of line, there was always a

50/50 chance a gun or a bullet or a whack

to the head would solve that problem  -  usually

did, no one blinked. 1967 in what's now called

Hell's Kitchen was still a wild, dark kingdom

of missing people, occasional dead bodies, etc.

For sure, no one jogged or walked around in

yoga tights, slippers and carrying their yoga

mats around. They'd have probably been buried

with those items the next morning. A lot of

the guys, the real working hard-ass guys there,

were dock people, maritime workers, haulers,

barge-men, etc. Irish, and hard as nails. Most

had records, and probably most had a battered

wife at home. That's the way it went. I remember

one of their jokes : 'Did you know the 41% of

the wives in the US are battered?' And the street

reply, around the bar, was, 'Really? I've been 

eating mine plain all these years.' Now the

confession : I never had a clue what they were

talking about; well, at first. Later I learned, but

back then how was any normal person to know

about that? Perplexed the hell out of me. It wasn't

like there was porno on every you-tube. You 

couldn't much learn except by doing  -  that 

included violence, fists, sometimes murder,

and sexual tidbits too. Remember, six months

previous I was in Woodbridge High School, 

and six months previous to that, an inmate 

in the seminary. Now, all of a sudden I had 

Jack the Ripper for an instructor and some 

filthy, out-of-his-gourd comedian as entertainer.

-

Yeah, it was a far switch. If anyone there then

had been forcibly, or even by suggestion,

corralled into thinking or acting a certain 

way, there would have been Hell to pay. On 

the other hand, in Pennsylvania (I always 

like to balance these two places against each 

other because the dichotomy is so very rich), 

most people, it seemed, ended up being pretty 

much alike because there weren't many other 

options. It wasn't as if there were exactly any 

pathfinders out before them; people who'd 

broken away before, and from whom they

could get lessons. 'Farmer Beatniks,' as it 

were. I never saw a book of any intellectual

value in anyone's home : not story book, not

novel, not study. They wouldn't have known

Jack Kerouac or Sal Paradiso, say, from JFK

or Joe McCarthy. I'd figure whatever schooling

they got out that way wasn't much targeted

towards anything except utility and vocational 

stuff. A core-curriculum of non-conformism

being taught just wouldn't have made much 

sense. The kids around there  -  which became

problematical after a bit  -  of high school age  -

began using me as their 'model.' Which was

OK as it went, but it ended up with just 

having someone or other always hanging 

around and, eventual problems one way or

the other. A wrecked car, girlfriend stuff,

or those occasional whiffs of pot smoking,

etc. One time, using a tractor, I had to fish

out Mike Meehan's '67 Mercury Comet from

my pond  -  he'd mis-swerved the long

dirt road going out and landed it in there.

Mike was pretty upset, crying on my porch

over what had occurred. We got it all squared

away, running, no damages. Years ago, and

the last I knew, Mike was a State Trooper

or Ranger or whatever it is, in Texas.  That's

where his estranged father had been living,

and he went out there. For a while local kids

were even running, or (trying to run) a little 

car-repair business out of my spare barn, 

which we worked up for a sort of auto-repair 

space. Until they turned it into more of a

local chop-shop than anything else. It was

riotous fun, that's not saying much. All of

this is, by the way, without saying that I

wasn't anything to be modelling oneself 

after, but what did anyone there know?

-

Now, these years later, and probably these

final years too, I'm in a town of absolutely

no consequence at all; as if I'd forgotten every

lesson about where and how to live that I'd

ever learned. Talk about imparting bad news.

The categories in my mind run from, on one

extreme, New York City, which I still feed off;

and at the other extreme, these rurified, country,

Pennsylvania experiences. In between are these

just-as-odd gamuts  -  the Princetons and the

Philadelphias of place, balanced out by 'Avenel.'

If Princeton was a person, and it had a butthole,

that would be Avenel. Unsightly paradise of

swampland and lethargic slow death, peopled

by ruminants 90 percent of who may as well 

be unschooled rodents of legend.

-

These days, I'm often called upon to testify.

I don't always know what to testify for, but it's

a mark of Mankind that you have to find core

beliefs and stand up (testify) for them. Some of

mine are that God lives within us, each, and that

that involves Love for others. Imparting. Reaching

out. Yes, all of that. Creative moments flood in,

if you learn to hit the tap right, and accept what

comes from it  -  that means abandoning foul beliefs

and walking away from insane definitions of things

which end up to be noting more than enslavement.

Here in this town I'm in now, most of that is nearly

impossible and the incredible foulness of place

takes over : the boorishness of others, and the

insulting smugness of a complete self-absorption. 
There's a small bottom-puddle of people who end
up simply making it uncomfortable for others.
It's like closed-club circuitry, thankfully, and
all they can do really is short-out each other.

A misanthropic devilment sets in and I think,

trying to imagine, what one of 'them' must be

like. Reeking, small, insipid females, with no

breeding at all. While, having to listen to that 
crooked  mouth and face, their men, facing that,

can realize only bad manhood of their own.

No wonder there's a prison here. 
When  grace is gone, it's gone.

-

I used to call the palace I lived at in Pennsylvania

'Ruritania.' It's actually a literary and made-up term
for an imagined place in three or four old Edwardian
British romance novels. Interesting (you could look
it up) in that it actually had a 'map' and a 'place'
in the body of old northern Europe. It sort of 
represented hope and goodness and a sense
of possibility. The idea was 'perfection' by the
isolated removal of spirit and self to some other
location away from the strife and demarcated
underpinnings of Mankind's usual issues. The
strange problem arises because, actually,
every place thinks of itself as that. In the
wilds of Pennsylvania, they didn't even know 
they thought of themselves in those terms,
but they did. In New York City, most certainly
they did not. The island of Manhattan is one of 
the most falsified and devastated geographies
in the world  -  certainly the worst one in terms
of THIS country  -  and it therefore sickens me
to see all those crane-necked snooker-balls
thinking they're better than everyone else, going
on all the time, those who do, about their purity
and their 'natural' foods and perfect garbage and
recycling practices and their prim veganism and
self-oriented subjectively focused seventy-five
dollar a veggie dining habits and artisinal foods
and beers and drinks. The place is a scalding
dungheap of festered garbage and bacterially
migratory plagues waiting to break out. Its
corollary, though without the food and the 
prices, but with the accompanying lack of
learning and loss of awareness, is this 13
feet above sea level nut-chunk called Avenel.
My point? My point everywhere is that it's
not so much the place  -  no, no  -  it's
oh so much more the people who we
allow, wherever we are. The uses of the
pure and the faraway, and the uses of the
bad and the congested, are not that distant
from each other. It's more the 'within' of
each of us  -  heart souls, and spirits, that 
make things what they are. And to all
that, I testify here.