Monday, October 26, 2020

13,182. RUDIMENTS, pt.1,081

 RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,081
(calculated risk?)
Back in those long, flat times
of 1967-era  New York City,
when the world really was truly
different, I had a friend with
whom I'd discuss or argue
any number of topics. No 
venom; it was merely a thing 
we did between times. He
liked to smoke his pipe and
be a bit pompous about his
opinions and categories, while
I was just my usual, sniveling,
first-responder sort. It worked,
and topics ranged to/from most
anywhere and any subject, with
female anatomies often included.
His definite inclusions of a few
items often left me blushing. I'd
not known girls as he had.
-
Hesitating to really delve into
this too much here  -  alas, poor
fellow is now long-dead, having
blown his own brains out in a
car (just like the Beatle's song?,
except I think they said mind, not
brains. I wonder whereat the meant
difference?)  -  I'll let him be and
just instead use one oddball example
to show what I mean; a strange one,
but an example nonetheless.
-
To my knowledge, there were about
six girls in his stable. You'd never
know it, really  -  he was not a charmer,
nor a looker, in any sense I'd ever seen,
but perhaps the chalky tone of personality
and pipe somehow combined to draw
girls into a fantasy of arty bliss. Or,
perhaps, he was just greatly endowed?
Much like Dean Moriarity, in 'On the 
Road,' he'd juggle girls, have set
time-frames for each, nothing ever
overlapping. I'm not really sure, either,
if any one of the girls knew about the
others; it was that artfully done. To me,
just another one of those crazy mysteries
of life that I never got the gist of. It was
always as if the inside-out of life never
got me to the inside of anything; it
just instead became in inside reversal.
anyway, that's how I spent my time.
-
One day the subject had gotten to the 
'Astronomy' angle of the cosmos, in a
sort of manner by which, a few years
later, Carl Sagan and his 'Universe'
series would achieve his fame and 
renown. The subject we'd brought
up to each other was the 'expanding'
universe, and how it was just then,
in those early 70's, being found that the
only constancy in the universe was the
ongoing, and unfinished, expansion of
the universe; the 'growth' outward
coming from somewhere no one knew
yet of; the infinite potential of the
universe's expansion; the essential
reversal by all this of the epic concept
soon/later to be termed 'black hole,'
which sort of refuted all this expansion
drivel or brought it in any case to a
severe, almost scary (far beyond the 
word 'dangerous') conclusion. 
Conceptually anyhow. The 'coming
in becoming the 'going out,' in one
dark and fell swoop of cosmic time.
-
The premise was the universe, being
unfinished, had to have a location
where the 'seams' of reality did not
meet. An opening had had to be left,
open, active, moist, and raw, from
which new matter spewed. It was a
sensual-visual image for sure, and he
then took it the next step. Egads!
Explaining his endless search,
through women, for that very spot,
in symbolic essence  - unfinished
and open  -  which each female
possessed. I have to stop there.
-
Anyway, my point wasn't about 
that. Instead, what I'd meant to 
write about was a modern phrase 
I ran across, which phrase encapsulates 
precisely another one of our discussion 
points. The phrase, these days, is 
'Shifting Baseline Syndrome,' which
sounds boring and vague enough.
It's known to refer to the 'generational
change of perspective' by which modern
kids view the world as totally different
then we did, or that we ourselves did
in relation to our 'parents' worlds, or
grandparents. As he and I used to
put it, in our discussions, 'WE' had
started out at '0'  -  meaning, for
instance, live telephone operators,
streetcars, tokens, round headlights,
etc. (to have named just a few, dopey,
ones), where the new kids of the '70's
began instead already at number 30,
say  -  Moon landings, wireless space
communications, color TV, expansion
baseball teams, and vacuum-packed
foods and freeze-dried coffees. So
the gap created thereby was '30.' A
zero was often hard-pressed in 
communicating with a thirty : a
different worldview; a different
set of assumptions. 
-
So, today's world now has an actual
phrase for denoting this, which to
us had been merely some further
gibberish to rant about, to each
other, over a beer or alongside some
decrepit and pitted W30's railyard.
(We often hung there, doing little,
mingling with the losers and bums
and old men. Chestnut wagons, horses,
carts, and hookers prepping to ply
their trade too. It was where the
'newbies' were sent to try their luck).
-
The phrase  -  no matter how hard I
thought, and think, about it, doesn't 
seem to work, and is, certainly, not 
'seamless' enough. Rather like saying, 
'identifiably incognito,' or 'recognizably 
anonymous.' The entire thing is a
bad mousetrap. In honor of my late
blown-to-smithereens friend, and all
his early girlfriends, and their own
'openly unfinished' bodies (as he
would have put it), I say, like in
describing the universe itself:
It's all 'Unfinished business.'




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