12,548. RUDIMENTS, pt. 960

RUDIMENTS, pt. 960

(mistah kurtz - he dead)

One thing that happened to

me, as I noticed, one of the

changes over age, was that

reading became different.

Many of the books I'd read

before, as a younger person,

I suddenly realized, as re-read,

that I must have never really

read them previous. It was

all different; I guess maybe it

was mostly just the idea of

retention, but it seemed as

if I now 'read' much more

carefully  -  noticing things,

seeing usage and points of

view, settings and character,

as if I'd never seen them

before. I don't know what it

all meant (means), but I

wonder if age always ends

up disliking its own youth.

Bad reflection in a primal

mirror I'd suppose. There is

no 'up,' and I've got nowhere

to go but down.

-

That California guy with the

crazy back-seat girlfriend, 

he's dead now; 13 or 14 years 

already. She's  -  last I knew -

living in Hawaii somewhere.

'Aloha' always sounded too

much like Mauna Loa to me.
(That's an active volcano there).

Just before he died - by his

own hand by the way - he'd

asked me to take off with him.

He wanted, as a manly excursion

of life-altering proportions, for

himself, and me, to chuck it

all, leave family and home, and

take off, without aim, to walk

the deserts of Afghanistan. Yes,

you heard that. Nomadic and

intrepid voyagers. He wanted

nothing; maybe a few rags and

some basic food, but no other

stuff; no bags or lodgings or

itineraries or schedules. No

anything at all. I declined;

he sort of grumbled, said

his piece, and in a few months

was dead. 3,000 miles away,

mind you, east to west coasts,

but dead nonetheless. I don't 

know what snapped to cause

all that, or if this refused trip

was germane to cause. Doesn't

matter now, as the dead bury

the dead; not me.
-
I think it's all, again, a matter of
differences; like that California
light-quality, or quality-of-light, 
which probably says it better.
In the same sort of way as the 
ancient Aztecs or Mayans, the place
seemed permeated with a different 
sort of creepiness, one that got
into people's souls and beings.
I fully expected platforms for a
blind, blood-sacrifice at each
street-corner, some ritual and
formal versification to the great
Sun-God of Being up above. But
I never really saw or heard it;
just glimmers and whispers.
Little kids in the cereal aisle
could be no more evasive as
the average resident there about
what was really going on.

What freaks me always though 

is the ways things slip from 

control. That entire 'helpless'

thing over and again. Magical

thinking, as I put it previously,will

say there's a reason and a cause,

and it will all work out, but I

can't fly with that at all, and it's

just stupid. Nothing magical

about it. Transformational

values are always underway  - 

that's why people do things 

like that original running off

to California in the first place.

You're taking some idea-stones

with you to re-create freely the

something that's in your mind.

When it fails, I think it fails hard.

At that point, we're all cowards

to some extent, and some more 

than others. We 'make' a life,

until it fails. It seemed to me,

there, that the major difference

between being there and being

in Perth Amboy or Rahway NJ

was that the folks in California

were conscious of the manners 

by which they were 'making' 

their lives. The work was all in

that making. Back in NJ, it

seemed to me everyone, by

contrast, just trudged along, 

taking what came. No great

ideas were ever initiated in 

that way, everything was 

seemingly 'proposed' out 

there first and it then slowly 

dribbled east. At the end of

his life  -  and I'll be brutally

honest here  -  what drove my

fried out of this life was the new

influx of Mexicans he was

seeing everywhere. It was all

he most often talked about -  

how that drive and dedication

towards origination was being

lost as California itself was being

put through the same strainer as

everywhere else. And this 17 or 

20 years ago already. I'd never

seen him so incensed about

things before, like that. He had

a veritable arsenal in his Vallejo

home, and, by the time this was

all over I was sort of glad he'd

decided to merely blow his own

brains out and not take out a

shopping plaza or a group home.

Everything was ablaze with 

craziness by then. I'd get a 

letter asking me to check out 

someplace in deep Pennsylvania 

for him, to find him somewhere 

he could resettle. Far-off country

up there, where I knew. But NOT

New York State; he abhorred it

and said it was no better than

California, and was in fact worse,

with rules and taxes and laws.

He wanted me to stay sure-south 

of that shared border (which is 

where I had originally been).

None of it helped; he made no

moves, and it all ended up on 

this Afghanistan break-out trek 

across the desert. Probably to a

sure death anyway so it was all

the same. The more things change

the more they stay the same and all

that. Past a certain point it became

stasis and nothing moved. And he

was dead. 'Mistah Kurtz - he dead,'

as Joseph Conrad put it in, I think,

Heart of Darkness.