Unexplained Carousel

A strange and foreign place lost in a reverie and you walk nowhere or anywhere and think nothing. And you’re prepared to see any sort of wonder or gape like an imbecile at the most mundane thing because it’s news to you. Wogs or supermen or ghosts or something live here. And the stone is not just stone but hard stone and your foot wears it away like Caesar and Michelangelo and Savonarola and all the nobodies did. You look like you belong here but you don’t. You walk and you look at everyone and everything and here you’re the child who can’t even ask for what you want and don’t know what anything is for and everyone is your friend and a stranger all at once and you are in in their thrall.

Then there’s this carousel in the middle of nowhere if this is nowhere how would I know with no one on it and it’s just there with no hint of a reason for it there are no children. There it is a world spinning empty. It doesn’t belong there and you don’t belong there and you stand there accusing one another of nothing. It serves only to remind you that your children are out of sight across an ocean and you weep for yourself and you weep for a whole goddamn continent that sent its children across an ocean never to return.

(Still) Swingin’

[Editor’s Note: A year old.]
{Author’s Note: I forgot all about it. What’s the chances anyone else remembers it? There is no editor.}

Would you like to take a turn?
No thanks.
Would you like some punch?
Have some.
My name’s Gil
Mine’s not.
Mind if I sit down?
No more than you standing there.
They have cake.
I baked it.
I like your dress.
It’s my mom’s. I’ll tell her.
I like your permanent wave.
It won’t last.
Your eyes are a pretty color.
Both of them?
I think I know your friends.
Perhaps you could introduce us.
I’ve got a job in the mill now.
Your fingernails told me that.
I was on the football team in high school.
Good thing we didn’t dance.
I… I…
Ahoy, mate.
Can I walk you home?
I’m not leaving.

Will you marry me?
Yes.

The Young Man Don’t Know Nothin’

Ya see, the young man comes in and he don’t know nothin’. That’s a given.

Well, not precisely nothin’. He knows all sorts of things. It’s just that everything he knows isn’t so, or ain’t worth a fart in a whirlwind to know. Useless.

But a young man ain’t born useless. You got to make him so. A young man is born to be a boon to his fellow man and a credit to his parents, if his parents don’t pay too much attention to him and ruin him. Let him be.

They come all in here, extravagant of hair but miserly with manners. They want to start right in being something. Son, you’re an unthrowed pot. Stand up straight and listen.

You see, you ain’t born knowing, and you can’t learn it in a book. How you gonna know to put fabric softener in the steam box to make the oak come out of there real withy and limber? Your grammar school teacher don’t tell you that out there in the real world you gotta use the ceiling for a brace for the inner stem while you make down the bolt.

Oh the smart ones come in, though, not as often as you’d like but often enough, and just remind you how dumb you were when you were their age. They’re young and handsome and clever and the whole world stretches out to their horizon. You’re already on the horizon and you know it. And you think to yourself how wise that boy is to come in here and stand up straight there with the wrong clothes and a box of the wrong tools, and not enough of them, and his hands like his momma’s –smart enough to say “I don’t know nothin’ but I’m willing to learn if you’ll show me.”

That boy knows everything.

So What (If It’s A Year Old)

[Editor’s Note: Another year older.]
{Author’s Note: And deeper in debt. There is no editor}

I wouldn’t put my finger in that change return slot if there was fifty bucks in it. The greasy handset, battered by a numberless army of salesmen and lovers, hangs like a murderer on a gibbet over the thing. Let the bums get it. She said she’d come. I’m not calling her any more.

I loved the feeling of the neon glowing on the side of my face in there. Don’t tell me it’s just light. I feel it like the sun. It’s the only sun I’ll ever acknowledge. The one in the morning rises alone. Mine rises when the manager flips the switch. It never sets on me, that sun.

Man, that scirocco of sweat and booze and cigs and breath like a welder’s tank. I feel like I’m born again, from a mummy’s womb. Straight on in, just like the music.

The stage is exactly three inches and a galaxy away from the dance floor. Dance? Please. Stumble around with a woman that ain’t your wife floor, I think. I like the old dude that looks like Batman’s butler or a fruity sort of baron or something that conducts or sways or whatever it is he’s doing. He’s possessed with it, same as me. He’s usually possessed of plenty of cake, a desire to buy a man a drink, and an aversion to arithmetic, too. The waitresses adore that.

The curtain is dirty from wiping your hands on it. Me included. It’s dirty like life is. Up high, it’s dirty with cobwebs and dust and corruption because you can’t reach up there. Down low it’s dirty with the grubby hands of all of us trying to wipe off the sweat and grease of what you’re doing.

I listen for the cornshucks of the brushes on the snare. He hits it, but I don’t care about that. In between — the faint circular sketching he does without thinking — that’s what I’m after. He’s lathering the dry face of the song so I can shave it with the sharp edge of the brass. The bass rumbles like thunder in the distance.

I can taste metal and blood and booze in my mouth. Tastes like life.

Then, Now, Then Again


My family has cabin fever. If it was summertime we could go for a walk somewhere, and I’d waste all my time taking pictures, and the kids would run like colts, and my wife would herd us all. It’s just cold and dreary here and we rattle around in our house. I can paw through old artifacts of trips outside, if nothing else.

I’ve walked down Benefit Street in Providence, Rhode Island many times since just after the first picture, from the Library of Congress, was taken in 1963. My brother lived on various addresses on Benefit Street while going to RISD in the late sixties. It was ill-advised to help a college student move back then. All they owned was books and vinyl records, and they kept them all on shelves made from concrete blocks and planks. And they never lived on the first floor.

Benefit Street was a dump back then, and is very much not a dump now. I took the second picture on a walkabout a couple of summers ago. It’s gratifying to see old things that made it. We routinely lose structures like that to the wrecking ball or in a pillar of smoke from a renter’s candle.

This one is called the Harris House. 1767, or so it appears from various deed records. There was an assortment of houses built on the property, and references to this property might be talking about structures long gone. The 1960s picture shows a sort of vestibule that was is out of place on the house, a testament to the the occupants freezing in the uninsulated house in the winter and making concessions to practicality. It’s removed now.

It straddles the timeline seam between Georgian and Adam colonial architecture. The doorway is the most common Georgian door I could name. The small entablature over the windows is more common on Adam style. It hasn’t lost much, but it could use the shutters back. It’s got storm windows instead. Real shutters are fabulously expensive to buy and maintain now. People are used to not seeing them on houses like the Harris house, but I find it mildly jarring, like a woman that has shaved off her eyebrows. Shutters add an enormous amount of depth, shadow, and rhythm to a facade, and are an opportunity to add a dashing dash of color that the lonesome door must shoulder alone now.

Regular people used to design and build their own houses with little more than a few pattern books and some common sense. Postmodernism killed any sort of discriminating eye for architecture the general public might have had. Pastiche supplanted a set of rules, and we lost both the original knack for vernacular building along with the frame of reference that would warn the potential builder: this looks goofy. How many houses in suburbia will make any visual sense to someone 250 years hence? Not many. People like Stephen and Abigail Harris used to achieve it almost without thinking. I’m not sure we can do it any more, even if we tried.

We don’t really try. I’d pay real money to live in the Harris House, lead paint, sketchy wiring, intermittent plumbing and all. You couldn’t give me a snout house on a typical suburban lot, no matter how much plastic you bang onto it. A house is more than a box to live in.

Or, it used to be, anyway.

I’m A Failure


If a man has talent, and cannot use it, he has failed. -Thomas Wolfe

I never read anything by Thomas Wolfe, that I can recall. I know who he is and recognize his work. He gets jumbled up in the Intertube’s hopper with our current writer, Tom Wolfe, who is a fine writer also. Although I’ve never read anything he ever wrote, either. I read a few paragraphs here and there and got the gist. He assembles the words well, and has a lively mind. He just doesn’t talk about anything I’m interested in. There’s a lot of people like that. There’s a titanic load of people after that, that can’t write, but do, that I ignore, too. I don’t lump them all in together.

A classic is a book people praise but don’t read, Mark Twain famously remarked. I do neither, generally. I just read Mark Twain. Saves time.

I stumbled across the quote by Wolfe and it got me to thinking. I say something similar, but less to the point, fairly often: Adversity discovers underlying weakness.

Most writers have one idea. No one will ever admit that, so don’t bother looking around for corroboration. It’s like a fiddle they saw away at over and over until the bow loses its last hair. There is no such thing as writer’s block. The writer just wakes up one day and has the terrible realization that his one idea might not be very good. Since no one has more than one, he just sits there until he goes back to his one idea, or drinks himself to death waiting for another that never comes.

It’s a kind of dumb fun figgering out a Dymo label for the intellectual mailslot in your mind for authors.

Hemingway: Adjective-less bull pestering
Kerouac: Lost and afraid to ask for directions
Mailer: Impresses other NYC apartment dwellers
Tom Wolfe: Astronauts paid my mortgage
Mencken: Everybody’s a jerk but me
Bierce: I can call you a jerk better than you can call me one
Churchill: In the olden time
Vonnegut: Starts nowhere. Goes nowhere
Thomas Wolfe: Understands Sippican Cottage, in advance, apparently

Ambition is an interesting thing. Tiger to ride? God to shake a fist at? Mob to stare down? I don’t really know. What it manifestly is not, however, is anything to do with talking about it with other people. It is a promise, in the form of a gigantic howling curse, that you hurl into the ether when no one’s around. Anything you announce to others is either posturing or complaining. Never complain and never explain, as Disraeli said.

I’ve said ambitious things to nobody a bunch of times before. They always boil down to this: If you will not have me as a colleague, you will have me as a master.

Infinite Calculus

There was a process for everything.

I remember the long languid early summer afternoons in mathematics class. The teacher would drone and the cicadas would chirrup outside the window. The equation would be chalked on the board and the intricate steps of the logic would be parsed out of it. I’d look out the window and remember her. Her equations were no less perfect.

The chair was placed just so. The toy was brought. The neighbors waved, and got their wave in return. The sun was in the right place to warm the side yard. When the button lost its moorings, there was a moment of recognition, and as ineluctable as anything Newtonian, the tray was produced; the color of the thread adduced and deduced; the problem solved. She’d always hum while she did anything; not musical, exactly –like a machine that is running just right. It was mesmerizing.

Her hand was delicate, but strong and practiced. Her whole life was like a roller at the summer beach. Quietly moving forward. The power was in it, but not made evident by any crash or foam. It was the residue of a million unseen forces distilled to an inevitability. You sensed very young that it would be very difficult to swim against its force, and pointless; so you turned your face to the sun and rode it instead.

I never understood why she introduced such a variable as me into her life’s equation. But after a while I realized that such a mind as hers could not be satisfied with simple arithmetic.

Das Internet Boot (Sails On)

[Editor’s Note: The bookshelf thing got me wondering about Paul Johnson and William Manchester books. I hazily recalled they’d both been mentioned here, hazily, a couple of years ago.]
{Author’s Note: I can’t wait until the new Internet paradigm allows me to get rid of the editor, and the enormous support staff I have to carry to publish these items.}

My mind is a cobwebbed thing. When I was young, I was like a human filing cabinet. You could ask me almost any obscure worthless thing and I’d trot it out rat-a-tat. The Lusitania’s sister ship. The manufacturer of Richtofen’s plane. Churchill’s mother’s name. Who played Agarn on F Troop. The chemical name for silicone.

I’m not like that anymore, and I don’t want to be. It’s tiresome for everyone involved to be a Jeopardy contestant out on the street. No one knows very much, really; most people don’t know much of anything.

I now know the joy of “Not Going.” By that I mean, I am not willing to subject myself to the exertions of chasing the trivial I’m not interested in. I have no interest in many things others commonly do, and I’ve lost the desire to manufacture that interest or feign the concomittant enthusiasm. It’s certainly not any form of elitism. I have the most profound disdain for the supposedly highfalutin’. I still watch football on television. If you think I’m going to sit still and have Katie Couric read me a bad newspaper every evening, you’re nuts. And I’ll read Twain ten times before I’ll read ten sentences of Norman Mailer. And I’ll only read the ten sentences as a sort of chore, to allow me to mention he’s a lousy writer and a defective thinker over dinner, if called upon.

I’d rather watch SpongeBob -again- than Sixty Minutes, anytime. SpongeBob is rooted in reality, after all; there are sponges at the bottom of the sea. Mike Wallace is unmoored from reality, and what reality he has is of his own invention. He wants to give me an impression — and he does –just not the one he’s aiming at. They both make me laugh, but only one pleasantly.

The internet is a most dangerous and magical sea for us to navigate. I swim through it, and let its atoms wash over me, and get a kind of impression from it, like the ocean. Warm. Cold. Tepid. Dangerous. Limpid. Every sort of thing.

It is said that most people have their minds made up, and simply cast about for information that gibes with their static worldview. The internet is perfect for them, as there is no thing too lame or outrageous that you can not find it by the metric tonne, footnoted. And defended to the death elsewhere in the primordial soup, to the very horizon and beyond, if need be.

I am not a utilitarian. I have no ends, so I seek no means. I swim through the vast thing — the muck, the weeds, the pale green still water, the rush of the waves and the pounding of the hurricane — and it washes all around me and gives me an impression. Or more accurately –an ongoing impression.

There is a kind of bloodsport being played in the internet world, and I think people are getting way ahead of themselves in their assessment of how important they are in the scheme of things. They are like sailors in a leaking tin tube creaking with the pressure, sweating and whiffing stale air and listening to pings on the hull, all the while thinking they’ve got it all figured out. The game is played so ferociously because the stakes are so small. Me? I can’t help but notice that Neither Ned Lamont nor Joe Lieberman is Julius Caesar.

My cobwebby mind betrays me again. A tidbit comes to mind. Is it Paul Johnson? William Manchester? Paul Johnson writing about William Manchester? Manchester writing about Churchill? I think it’s Paul Johnson writing about Manchester writing about Churchill, but to tell you the truth, I don’t care. I could find it on my shelf, but not on the internet, and so it does not exist, according to many.

Anyway, one of them went into the heart of northern India after the British decided to skedaddle and let Gandhi do it. A million persons lost their lives then, give or take, as that simmering pot was unlidded. The vestiges of the Mughul Empire showed right through the modern fabric. The assignment was to go to remote parts of India, and ask the man in the unpaved street if it was a good or a bad thing that the British Empire had left India.

They did not even know that the British had come.

Month: February 2008

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