Monday, May 14, 2018

10,822. RUDIMENTS, pt. 315

RUDIMENTS, pt. 315
Making Cars
In 1971, once I'd fled my NYC
crime-scene life, hoping for no
catch-up, no trails of debris
following me, I managed to find
(I've told all this before in other
chapters, so I'm not repeating it
all again), a place and the means
of disappearing, hiding myself
out enough in the deep, wilds of
high Pennsylvania 'ruritania' that
I was able to reconstruct an identity
and have a sort of new life by which
none of the people involved knew
my old life at all. You hear about
this stuff sometimes  -  outside of
those government new-identity
schemes for guys and snitches
who tell on the Mob or on spies
or drug-deals  -  and it does work.
I had a tiny bit of money, shopped
around for 10-15 acres and a place
to live, thought about Vermont,
New York State, and more, but
ended up with the most simple
of the solutions -  high and dry
in some weird, twisted NE corner
area of wild, loose Pennsylvania.
When it was still really that. I
found what I wanted, made the
deal, flipped a few levers, and
managed to get it all done. From
that new Day One, as far as I
was concerned New York City
no longer even existed as place.
-
Again, as I've written before, it
took about a year until all that
collapsed. Ithaca and Cornell,
quite nearby, had beckoned.
That town and campus was
still boiling over with hippie
and radical ferment. I soon
realized it too could be my
place. In between the two
places was an old half-city
called Elmira. Of Mark Twain
fame, mostly. Langdon family
stuff. It was tired, and wrecked,
a real dog of a place, like
Plainfield or Paterson, NJ  -
ripped, torn and barely standing.
Perfect, even more, for the
invisibility I sought. And
this whole new scene,
straddling the borders right
there of both Pennsylvania
and New York, within 20
miles either way, suited
me just fine.
-
As a new, mysterious, farmer
guy, short-haired again, scrubbed
clean, in tee shirts and farmer
work-jeans, I did a pretty good
imitation of any old yokel you'd
imagine. It was performance,
and it went pretty well. It was
all predictable stuff; these farmer
people didn't have an original
bone in their bodies so it was the
easiest thing in the world to both
replicate and predict and assume
their ways and points of view and
what was coming next. And how
they'd say it. I might have still
been there now, I guess, had
not other things intervened. But,
whatever. Lots of stories there.
The one thing, in the middle of
all that simplicity and plain
piety about God and church and
being right and good, and their
blessedness and all that crud,
that I did notice  -  and it was
pretty surprising  -  was how
all these farm folk, no matter
what outside veneer they may
have had, went at it, these guys,
farm-like and animalisticaly,
slamming like drakes any
chance they'd get. Hopefully
most all of the times it was with
their wife, but I'd heard, and I
knew of, plenty of other stories
too. I was told, 'growing up
around farm animals always
doing it, nobody around here
things twice even about it.'
-
I did get real familiar
with cows. I got to know
cows inside and out, literally
-  once or twice roping new
legs and literally pulling calves
out of the mothers under-the-
tail birth canal. Sometimes it
happened that the calves got
stuck, maybe halfway or a
quarter way out, and they
could strangle or just gag
to death at that point, unless
they were just 'yanked' out,
where they'd land on the hay
or whatever beneath in a
terrible-looking, bloodied
goop of a mess. The moaning
and the lowing of cows indeed.
They don't always just slide
out so easy. Remember that.
I used to sit and watch cows
 -  they seemed like people
sometimes. A cow will chew
her food, or cud, or some
feed-hay, for what seems
like forever. There's an
odd crunching sound they
make, chewing. Not like
when people eat cookies,
but nonetheless a definitive
sound. They have flat teeth.
Wide and broad; there's nothing
pointed at all. They chew kind
of sideways too. It's a combination
of both the up-and-down chomp
thing and a left and right, sideways
jaw movements  -  it's a lot like
a mortar and pestle thing, gringing
something up. In this case, the
particles of their feed or silage or
hay get pulverized and ground by
the sideways motion. But, while
they eat, a cow just stares. You
gotta' figure, they're not talking,
have nothing to say, no one to say
it with or to; they express no
opinions, state no claims or ideas
either. So if you're in range, or
anyone, while they're in place,
chewing, they'll keep a steady
and straight bead-eye on you.
Any movement, any little thing
you do, they just watch. Observe.
-
Part weird. Part eerie. Ever been
deeply stared at, for a long time,
by another species? I've done it
in zoos too. It's all kind of
people-like but it's not either.
People are different because
you know they can talk, they're
thinking, and, even if they're
really dumb-clucks, they usually
would find something to say.
Eventually. And it doesn't bear
that distance of cross-species
stuff. Because of that there's no
mystery, and you can almost
advance any next move on 
their part for them.
-
About this time, there was a 
big rock-festival post Woodstock 
type thing in Watkins Glen. At 
the speedway  - I don't know the
incidentals, but it was all the 
usual pop-culture hoo-hah. The
Band was there, a lot of big name
acts, music, hippie stuff. It was
all already out of date, in some
respects, but up that way, along 
the whole Finger Lakes corridors
and Ithaca and beyond, there were
still communes and group-homes,
with strange clutches of almost
unearthly knotheads living
on air. I know, because I was
almost one of them  -  but I'd
had my own reverse Damascus 
moment (St. Paul reference),
wherein I got back on the horse
I'd been thrown from and trotted
on off. (That's funny, OK). If
you didn't know about any of 
this stuff, you didn't know. Like
these farmer guys all around me :
'what the hell is all that? What's
going on?' There wasn't much 
you could say to them : 'Just
another bunch of kids, and their
music. Don't worry over it.'
-
At this point, the way I mostly
looked at everything was in the
same manner as the Occam's Razor
thing: when first presented with 
a quandary, a confusing question,
something  needing a solution, etc., 
look at all of the presented options, 
and opt then for the simplest one, 
the least-complicated one. None
of that sounds like much, nor
very deep at all. But it worked.
Like milking the cow who was
just staring ahead, not even moving,
just chewing sideways, and with
those two big eyes, just letting
the world roll by.

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