RUDIMENTS

RUDIMENTS, pt.330 Making Cars I guess I was always an absurdist at heart. Not one in a prolific, obvious sense, just in a more subtle manner. Nothing ever really made sense or added up for me, and I simply made that my raw material. Why fuss otherwise. It was all around me, every chance I saw was for an absurd statement of reality. Absurdity is a quite difficult thing to categorize and explain, and that's half its charm. A reader can feel it, and not get the rhythm at all of what's running through them. This entire series of, for instance, bar things, can run along the borderline of the absurd, for that is what they are. Each barroom I ever entered was like a theater of the absurd playlet in action  -  characters, dialogue, scenes, and fade-outs too. The absurdity of Puffy's for instance was as an orphanage of a tavern: the industrial basis that once had been all around it, and the men who worked therein, wa

RUDIMENTS, pt. 329 Making Cars When you get out of Nancy Whiskey Pub and roll yourself down to Puffy's, that's a whole other story. Or was then; it's been a while now since I've been there. Puffy's used to have, displayed in its front window, an old photograph, maybe 16x20 inches, framed, and that photo showed old Hudson Street, maybe about 1935, when it was a working-class street, lined with small shops, lofts, and factories. All for the kind of guys who used to work there, and drink at Puffy's. Across the street was the Western Union Building made famous by the writings of Henry Miller, and, nearby, a Bell Tel place and, across from Puffy's at the corner exactly, the grand, old, 1880's building that was once the headquarters of the New York Mercantile Exchange. (In the 1920's and before, someone in my wife's family line was the President of that Exchange, go to find out). That building was

RUDIMENTS, PT. 328 Making Cars I didn't often like to sit still; therefore I always kept on  some sort of move. Idea-move. Something would hit me, and I'd get possessed, of some notion or idea, and  drag it right to completion. Sliming myself through the muck, if that's what it took. I had no other ideas about life. It still drives me crazy to see how some people can sit around for five hours, in one place, yapping over their food, cake and coffee; about nothing at all anyway. - Spectacular results? No, never. It was just a means, for me, of staying alive. I'd get enamored  of not so much the things in and of themselves, but the  ideas behind the things. One time, over by the area where Canal Street intersects with Hudson Street  -  a spot I was at twice a week, at least, for  some years  -  some guy, as an art installation one Summer, erected this hand-built hut or shelter or whatever, authentic and made