RUDIMENTS, pt. 944
(dead, stuck, and anchored)
How does one get serendipitous?
Do the new arrivals in Heaven
know immediately where to go?
I always thought yellow journalism
wasn't 'journalism' at all. It was
just people too chicken to point
specific things out - thus, 'yellow.'
Heck, think of where all that would
get us. We'd still be getting ptomaine
from bad industrial food-canning.
Those business types will do anything
they can do cut corners and make a
few more pennies.Which brings me
to my next point - an issue with me
my entire life, and I've actually even
worked for a guy whose other line
was a restaurant out in the boonies.
Why would anyone pay to eat out?
To eat food prepared by others?
In the first place, if it's a corporate
restaurant, one of those ass-happy
places with booze and eating, loud
noise and music, it's corporate. The
frozen foods and entrees are probably
40 days old already, nutritionally
inert, tasteless and gummy too, and
carried in by weekly truckings. If
it's a local person's restaurant, it
may be a little different in that regard,
but still, in either situation, the profit
motive rules. They'll open the place
up with some fanfare and a showcase
menu, and then, three months later,
everything begins getting fine-tuned.
They'll find out it's cheaper to buy
160 frozen entrees to microwave
up then it is to get 30 a week; so
their hunt for 'economies of scale take
over - your food is 40 days frozen.
They notice what sells, what doesn't;
they review costs and feasibility for
this or that. Then they begin, in the
name of sustaining a profit, to cut
what they may - inferior ingredients,
fewer or different seasonings, faster
prep, shortcut here, shortcut there.
They may be feeding you, yes,
but they're also gauging your party
for table-time, what you buy, what
they begin omitting, what you'd
not notice. The predominant issue
is profit and bottom line, not your
food and dining. Why bother?
-
Well, anyway, that's just me, and
the real reason I would never dine
out is because of price, mainly;
but I also have a real aversion to
eating publicly. It seems a gross
thing to do, and the presence of others
holds out no joy for me. I'm a light
and delicate eater, hate leaks and
slop, the sounds of chewing and all
that, watching people's plates and
the guzzling and muck that goes on.
We should all be so private. Maybe
it's all (once again) because of that
damned seminary stuff - enforced
group dining, three times daily, with
a mass of idiotic male teens. You
never outgrow your need for...yuck?
-
I guess serendipitous stuff is just
another version of that whole 'timing'
thing. That Chasen's drugstore or
Schwab's kind of episode all over
again. People turning a corner or
entering a store and, wham! they
get discovered. Most of those
stories probably should be taken
with a grain of salt (whatever
that actually means), but maybe
some of the essence is true. It goes
back a lot, in part, to that numbers
thing I mentioned in an earlier
chapter one - one two back - about
certain agglomerations and tallies
of numbers. When they happen,
or some version of them, you enter
another spot entirely, the skies
open for you - as it were, you're
stepping into destiny, or fate.
That all works fine, as a working,
numbers, tally, but once the final
numbers roll in, you're done. It
happens to all. 'In that you are
not so unique.'
-
Tires are round - they aren't really,
that's just what we call it. The
peculiar essence of 'roundness' does
not exist except for 'words'. In the
same way as the perfect cylinder
of a six-gun seems eminently right
for the perfection of that circularity
and 'six,' a 'seven-gun' somehow
just wouldn't work or be the same.
It's just the things we adapt to.
I used to think of that when helping
those wagon and cart guys along the
west side - 17th, 15th sts., etc. and
their horses. Each of them and their
horseshoes. What is a horseshoe?
It's a very indeterminate word, I
guess describing something, a
thing-that-is, in this case self-defining.
We seem to know exactly what is
meant, but what is it we are saying?
The description? Or the thing? And
of either, which is more 'correct'?
These are human terms and human
things, and the world is made up of
them, but if a person is not careful
they can lose all of that and just be
absorbed, with the meaningless, by
the saying of whatever they're saying.
A person MUST, then, remain
conscious of everything.
-
You see, the problem is if you go
around with stuff like this coming
out of your mouth your 'timing' is
going to be so far off even the
Battery-To-Times Square bus won't
hit you. You'll be one-step ahead
of the impact, or just off. You get
all those sky-watching Mt. Palomar
type telescope guys, digging way
out to deep space, and they walk
off to take a whiz, and, boom!,
they come back having missed the
stellar explosion they've been
waiting on for 31 years. They
come back to peaked, waning
blackness, 6 minutes off! And
that's on light that had been
traveling for 4.33 light years
to show itself.
-
It always seemed - odd as it was -
that everyone somehow agreed
on what, say, 'Yellow' was, or the
'roundness of that tire and wheel.
Yet, 'Democracy' or whatever
operative phrase one pushed, tended
to say 'every person for their self'
as far as deciding goes - what's
false, good, or bad, or true. There
are dangerous threads of anarchy
woven into all that, yes, but men
and women most generally do agree
on round, and yellow, and, yes,
horseshoe. It's a stable (no pun)
shortcut we take to keep the world
in one piece. But it doesn't need
to be, it's not in our make-up. Or
is it? How far did the Tower of
Babel concept go? Using one's
own faculties to determine for
oneself isn't that great an idea.
I remember some old ad from
the 1970's, about car loans. 'We
loan for any make,' etc. The image
with the ad was always a vehicle
made up of parts, fenders, lights
and the rest from a grab-bag of
all different cars : Buick, Ford,
Chevy, Pontiac, Valiant, etc.
The idea got across. The ad
worked, but it was the most
simple of concepts. The 'other'
idea of 'Concepts,' it would
not work for: The American
philosophical method was
weird - old things were all
supposed to have died away
and we were to be grounded,
if at all, on our own new concepts.
No longer bound by the tradition
or ritual of old. Prejudices of
religion, class, and family :
Gone!
-
It never quite worked that way,
at all. From the very beginning,
each person took claim to their
thought, their own stance, as
being the predominant stance :
churchman had their divine
standards or revelation,
aristocrats for their reverences
towards antiquity, fathers for
ancestral integrity, and such.
'Even if men seek authority,
they cannot find it where they
used to find it in other regimes.'
That made things tough. It was
thought 'Men' were on their own,
well, maybe, but, not. Yellow
remained yellow and round
remained round, thankfully.
-
The problem, as it arose, was
that the 'common' beliefs of
ordinary people are what took
over. And those common beliefs
become what was determined as
proper judgment - and of course,
that was what I'd been fleeing
from. It hit me. It hit me like a
round, yellow, horseshoe, and
one as yet without a name. If,
thereby' all men were thinking
alike, for convenience's sake,
was it not, in a sense, viral, and
spreading. Common thought,
taking no chances, no depth
of field, just a really dull
snapshot of a supposed place
and time. How quirky! And
that's exactly what we have
now - the dullest of the dull,
always doing the most dull things.
I'd left all that, long ago and
with a very grand thankfulness,
but it still comes back to haunt,
and every so often, bite. The
common bite, like a lowly
mosquito. In the absence of
anything else, the most common
of beliefs will take over, and
the most common of men will
let it go that way, and remain,
stupidly, satisfied. My own
way-station was constantly
moving. It seemed everyone
else's was determined to remain,
in place, dead, stuck, and fully
anchored in all the old things.
