RUDIMENTS

RUDIMENTS, pt. 902 (don't assume?) One of the things that always bugged me, back about 1965, was a song or movie or something called 'Cat Ballou.' I never even got the bottom of what it or who it was supposing to be, but I think it was some female movie role played by some of another of the many dim-witted, appropriately breasted, starlets of that era. It hardly now matters because I still probably care even less. There was also some jerky pre-vert singer type whose signature version of the song seemed to be everywhere. I don't really remember the year, if it was Summer, or whatever. I just remember the distinctly precise and predictable stupidity of the guy's face - Scottish or Welsh, I think, who sang it always with some weird grin. The melody and the tonal quality was gross, and the way the 'let's all sing and grin this happy-together' kept flying around the nation really made me sick of th...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 901 (boy if I knew) Sometimes I myself get baffled by the sorts of things that come my way, or which I then turn up. A few chapters back here I wrote of a 'new' language to be needed for an indeterminate future which will have outmoded all of ours, of the present day. Three chapters back, when I wrote that, it was as startling to me as it reads; coming as it did from nowhere, not really processed or strategized. I went with it, wrote through it and ended up happy with the result. (Rudiments, #898, 'Straightforward'). Ok, so that all settled out, and then today I run across something I was reading, and there, right in front of me, is a presentation, in a random-psycho-physics sort of way, a few paragraphs that touch on much the same. Hmm? Too shaky for me. 'Cordellas are invisible symbols that surface. As they do, they show the universe in a new light, by the very nature of their relationshi...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 900 (money honey) There are many people who still live by 'Science.' Those folks will still be around probably another 40 years before they're all shook out of the system. As when I myself was a kid, there will still be sorts of old 'throwback' people I used to see. The 1920's leftover guys, all over old Avenel, with their sheds and workshops, kilns, brickmolds, smoking their pipes, in their bib overalls. You don't see any of that nowadays. Used to be there'd be old Polish guys living like that, leftover Germans and super-practical Swedes and Dutch, puttering around in their yards, making fences and sawing wood. None of that's left and now any 'fences' you see are mostly and probably white plastic privacy fences. Keeping the rest of the world out, I guess  -  since there's not that much to keep 'in.' It was a mu...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 899 (hit hard, and be gone) A lot of people are certain of everything - or many things anyway. All my life I've noticed that; a strong and steady form of attesting. Certainty. Something I never have had; for me it's all been a haze, a twisting gray area of always-maybes. That's always been enough for me, and oddly enough that 'uncomfortable' feeling in this world has been my comfort zone. I've never fretted too much over that; just accepted it as my way, and moved on. Business-people, I learned early, are ultra-certain. In a way, they never see how it ruins their lives, and runs those lives too, but the one-minded devotion to making money and having a successful business enterprise must, by its own working definition, take over. They are stressfully and singularly dedicated to their constant task, at the forward expense of everything else. I've seen it lots and lots of times. I'd ...