RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,292
(shows the way things go : downward)
(Princeton/Labyrinth, pt. THIRTEEN)
I never had much to do with social
matters. Princeton stuff, for all its
panache and frilly glory, was all
mostly about the same stuff - with
established and wealthy people putting
it all out (but actually doing very little
except advertising themselves), for the
troubled and those disadvantageous.
It was otherwise a draw. I liked a
phrase about this phenomenon which
I heard much later - 'virtue signaling.'
Someone so anxious to show, by a
brand name or even just a logo or an
enthusiasms, that they were there for
the 'GOOD of us all. Save the Whales,
and Ban the Bomb, while at it too.
I'd see it often, in Princeton, on the
most hierarchic of mannerisms: Bumper
stickers (of course, of only virtuous
things) on closed laptops!. What the
hell was with that? Some utterly
abnormal dweeb would plop down
and pull out, from a one-hundred and
seventy dollar lap-top bag, a high-level
laptop covered with stickers, when
closed. I thought it was obnoxious,
and sloppy-as-hell to look at too.
I figured maybe it was just a Princeton
Patter sort of thing, but then I also
began seeing the same stuff, at Rutgers,
Lafayette, and Lehigh (other places
I'd go). University life, I guess, was
nothing more than one vast buzz, and
all the same too. The meek shall inherit
the Earth, you know, and in this case, the
pretentious loudmouth signalers had it
all over us.
-
'Yeah, well, you're gonna' get a lot of
that, especially in a place like this. You
can't let it rattle you. Like old Thom Nash
told his childhood buddy Sam Clemens, 60
years later, when the re-met on a visit to
Hannibal, Missouri, and gazed out over the
town and its crowds assembled, (in their day
Hannibal held 2,000 (1835). Sixty years later
it was 13,000 (1902)). Nash said :'Same damn
fools, Sam; same damn fools!' The guy who
told me that was some old Princeton local poet
who lived by Poorhouse Road. I never even
knew Princeton had such a place until I saw
he lived there, but there wasn't anything poor
about it; oh, maybe just a bit neglected. His
claim to fame poem was a funny little piece
about growing up, seen through his little-kid
eyes. It opened like this: 'If Ma, why not Da?'
A musing on Mama and Dada nomenclature.
We were sitting around someplace, having
coffee and 'shooting the breeze' - as the
old saying once went; probably can't rightly
even say it now, let along write it. It was a
day much like today, early in May, when the
sun is out and you figure all will be warm and
blooming, but no matter for any of it, the chill
of a very late Winter still holing on, lingers and,
retarded already by two or more weeks, any of the
usual season progress for the trees, plants, and
shrubberies are running just plain late. Princeton
always prided itself on its garden/plantings
beauty spot, which they called 'Prospect Gardens',
and of which they made a big deal out of for
every one of the Spring and Graduation Month
festivities and especially Alumni Week and Parade,
which is when every absolute fool who EVER
attended Princeton was able, by invitation I
guess, to return, get drunk, and be allowed to
act the absolute intellectual gangster, this time
alcohol-fueled again, for three or four days. Each
year's festivities were always a photo delight for
me. Prospect Gardens was once the backyard garden
of Mrs. Wilson, back when her husband Woodrow,
was University President and then USA President
(era,1912). Just a year or three back, the University
decided that - instead of revering old Woodrow -
they'd abandon him, for being a racist, and a
white-supremacist Virginia implant into stately
Princeton NJ. They took his name down, off
everything, The Woodrow Wilson School of
International Politics, which had been a great and
valued school for many years, and from which
came many diplomats and political scholars.
All gone now, so that the large-crotched girls
of some particular racial persuasion could have
their way. I think the Prospect Gardens should
by destroyed, overnight, some night, and maybe
even paved over just as quickly. And I'd pay
good money too, if I had it, to help the job
get done. We don't need no faggy flowers!
Same damn fools, Sam!!!!
-
Of course, now, when you're sitting in the
faculty lunch room dining on one of
those mighty-good lunches, what is it that
all the windows and views open out too?
I'll give a guess, but the answer is, Prospect
Gardens!!!. Ain't no geek-freak of any
pathetic Princeton glory-masturbator is going
to let that be taken away from them - slavery,
poverty, injustice, war-mongering and
financial hanky-panky notwithstanding. 'Let
those devils fend for themselves, I'm eating!'
-
In my years, I've had plenty of light-stab
experiences rattle me, but I got over
most every one, and it's never been - until
recently - that such an investiture as heart
surgery and prostate surgery, in an almost
lethal two-month sequence, have shaken me
to the extent that I'm now heartily trying to
recover from; getting back into some
semblance of human order, and even
pissing once again like a human.
There's so much here to pick from that
I hardly know where to begin? Princeton
wasn't a high-degree school like Harvard
Medical or somesuch, so there weren't
really hospital things to turn too - closest I
knew, maybe, were a book called, 'Driving
Mr. Albert' - a true story about the guy
assigned to drive Albert Einstein's preserved
and pickled brain from its perch at the
Institute For Advanced Study, off Library Place,
by Einstein's cute little house, to Stanford
University or someplace like that, in
Stanford, California. It wasn't much of
anything really, but made for a cool
little story. The Princeton Hospital used
to be way down at the area of lower
Witherspoon - served many, and was
adequate. That was where Einstein died.
Joyce Caroles' husband died there too. a
Princeton Professor. She went through hard
time with that, but wrote a magnificent
story from it, entitles 'A Widow's Tale; I'm
thinking maybe 2009. An a few years
before that, Joan Didion, lost both her
husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and
their adopted adult daughter, Quintana. She
too wrote a masterful retelling of the
episode, entitle 'The Year of Magical
Thinking. Soon enough afterwards, some
one of those scumbag-multiple-hospital and
mega-corporations, closed the hospital,
re-built over into fancy-ass condos, and
rebuilt a state of the art spaceship-looking
hospital out along Rt. One, one town over,
and not even any longer in Princeton.
Princeton lost its hos[pital, and a bit of its
heart and soul as well .
-
Shows the way things go : downward.
No comments:
Post a Comment