RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,369
(just because the train is moving...)
My life has been a twist. I've been
a very haphazard sort. Like red lights
in Italy, for me rules were meant to be
for advisement only, negotiated over,
or otherwise, then, gone around. As a
Math teacher would ask, 'How did you
arrive at that correct conclusion? You've
followed none of the rules for solving.'
I'd just smile and hand the stupid guy
his math-problem answer. You can't
correct a guy who's already got it right.
-
So, how to put it? As an artist, when I
face a bare surface for painting, I have
no real idea where I'm starting, nor to
where I will have been brought by my
finish. I see Art as the antithesis of
'engineering' or plotting. Look at that
word again, please - antithesis. As in
'anti-thesis' Art is always opposition.
-
At the same time, and as a writer too, my
internal scan - for both art and writing -
is always on and at work. Noticing details,
grabbing lines and phrases, pulling words
and content. 'Recording' as it were, all the
world I experience, or imagine. In fact,
come to think of it, my 'bare surfaces'
aren't even normal. I hate painting on
perfectly primed and stretched canvases.
'The goodly Walmart rectangle', I call it;
the chunk of pre-processed professional
base so ready for your pretty seashore
scene or cute cat in the doghouse pet
portraiture with every dog-hair and fluff
just right. Not for me the stable or the
hearth. I used to call that 'tree on a bridge
art' - another funny disclaimer. Critics
call it 'Dexterity Below the Elbow.' I
I much prefer painting my work on
found or cast-off pieces of wood,
weirdly scraped and shaped.
-
There are textural differences everywhere.
The person living the perfectly neat, all in
place, not a nit out of order, life, well, they
may be happy and they may get all the good
press, while the sloppy guy, with a million
projects going on - all full of interruptions,
and scabrous in his sloppiness, gets called
names and can either end up as a hoarder
long in debt's mess, or in jail but with
nothing to confess! It's the way society's
foul opinion of an unusual outlier goes.
Who cares about that?
-
Curiously enough, my goodly wife is the
exact opposite of me, to a degree I find it
difficult to fathom. I can't unpeel and eat a
banana without another lecture on properly
recycling the peel, which plants and maybe
animals can make use of it, and, thus, where
to place the peel. The same goes for the
usual separation and recycling of wrappers,
boxes, shipping sleeves and all the rest.
I think recycling, to be frank, is a crock,
and an organized waste of time, and that
if it wasn't just another part of the usual
ploy by the Government to keep people
stressed, worried, and distracted with
having to do this, and be aware of all this
crap, they suddenly see the light and the
revolution would be on. Every damned
nit-wit on the planet is now an instant,
self-taught, expert of global this or that,
or of recycling, weather patterns, ocean
currents, plastics in the ocean, birds and
mammals dying off, icebergs breaking
and melting - while NO ONE in the
varied Governments or their agencies,
tells Pillsbury to stop wrapping their
retail crap in plastics of a million natures,
or retail distributors of toys, auto parts,
equipment, household good, foods and
snacks (generally held under the better
rubric of 'bad shit to eat'). They just
allow all the profits to be made and
throw then the burden of clean-up and
separation to the little dweezily regular
person to carry the guilt and the duty
of undoing somehow all the damage.
I think they'd like nothing better than to
make anal/retentives out of the entire
population. It's really a conspracy. If
none of this gets through to you, then
maybe we shouldn't be friends.
-
A regular, rule-abiding, person wouldn't
dare make up a word, as I just did (dweezily)
in that last paragraph. As an adjective, I
guess, not that I care about that either. And
that's a real good way of distinguishing an
adventurous, creative, personality too : How
he or she handles language. With disdain, or
with the aplomb of pretending to be royalty
and talk as if there was a golf ball in the mouth.
-
My wife will gladly spend 35 minutes, before
we leave for the municipal recycling center,
separating all this crap - glass, by color.
(Somehow it all matters differently). Plastics,
by the differing markings on them, as for
what degree of recycled material is present
(?) within the plastic. She delights in all this.
To the crazy incontinents at the recycling
center, this all means things of great import.
'China won't take it' is the usual answer!!!
Evidently these days the Chinese come first,
whether it's the boat-loads of junk they send
us, or the crap-heap loads of garbage and
trash we send them back. Curiously, the
truckloads of human, municipal, jellied
waste (shit/feces), that comes from our
east-coast cities, has no opposition over
being trucked across state lines and deep
into Pennsylvania to be dumped somewhere
along the way by Wilkes Barre.- I see it
all the time, and I've even been hit one
time (side-swiped) by a shit-truck
crossing the Jersey border down by
Trenton/Princeton, (though I could have
been killed), and his company owned
up to everything - paid all my repairs,
and three weeks rental of a replacement
vehicle, a Dodge Daytona to be exact.
In 2008. The guy said he didn't see me,
and apologized. He lived in Plainfield.
(I tracked down his house, in cast they
(his company) didn't pay up).
-
Just because the train is moving, that
doesn't mean the people inside it
aren't dead.
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