RUDIMENTS

RUDIMENTS, pt. 946 (it's done differently now) Well, I suppose the nicest thing that can be said about me, or these works here anyway, would be for me to be told they read as 'accomplished.' That's really all I'd ask. A means of equating that with some sense of accomplishment resulting from all the years of crap and bedevilment I had to put up with. For me, the situational abyss was always pretty wide, and most of the time it was fairly obvious Take, as an example, Princeton. For some nine years I went there every day, by any passing assemblage of means by which I chose to arrive. There were times when I'd drive each day for four or five months, and then go back to the train; a daily double-take that was, mostly fun only because it was interesting. But it was social. I don't care what anyone says, I'll take the solitude of one's own vehicle any day. I met a lot of people through train ...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 945 (intimations of immortality) I used to find myself saying things like, 'I'm tired of this, I've had it with that, I'm changing this, it's the last time this will happen...' I don't say that stuff any longer, being beyond in years now; I end up saying. 'I'll take it. I'll deal with it as is. Hell, I'll accept everything, anything, now.' Just an aside that a bit funny. Go ahead. Laugh. You'll be here someday too. - Over my unheralded NYCity years, a lot hung. Allen Ginsberg. Ed Sanders. Peace Eye. Fugs. Cat Mother. Diggers. Angels. Mad  Hatters. Cops and criminals too. I survived. I dug my rants at the Psychedelicatessant, still being unsure of how they spelled that crappy name. William Burroughs too; and W. H. Auden, when he lived on St. Mark's. I really tried staying with it, but a lot of it just came off wrong to me. Like Ginsberg; as much as I really d...

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 to 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 ine...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 943 (nothing but attitude, nothing but air) I didn't know anything about basketball, ever. In the seminary, the senior guys, seeming so much larger and wiser than me, would often sit in the bleachers, talking basketball - of course, in the basketball gym. I only knew most of these fellows by name or reputation. In the usual private school format among boys, there were certain kids who would rise up to positions of predominance over others. Whether they really were or not, is another case. It's all chancy, because, for example, John Banko died in prison, years later, as priest-pervert. Go figure what any of that's about. The dominant basketball person, professionally, was Bill Bradley. He was or had been a standout at Princeton. They were slavishly dedicated to him - this was long before there were black faces or funny names in basketball. As lily-white, it was, as Lily White herself. (I met Bradley a few times later, when he ...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 942 (I guess the stairs were too much) Much like old men in their season, the heirs to Michelangelo will put a bullet to the back of my head; well, they will if I ask them to anyway. I wonder if I should be kneeling for that? I read once, in some book or something by I think it was Nick Tosches, that if it's done right the body will remain in that position, and not even topple. Here's the quote: "Louie pulled the trigger through the plastic bag, [the pistol was in, like an evidence bag], and that was that. He stepped back. Perfect. It was funny: if somebody was kneeling and you did him close and straight through the head, really close and really straight, just so, with no second shot to jack him, he would stay kneeling. But if you tried to set up some collapsed, discombobulated stuff to make him look like he was on his knees when he went, it was a real pain to do, and it never looked right; never....

RUDIMENTS, pt. 941 (another corky gets conked) Anyone who is ever 'shocked' by the results of something, seems to me, wasn't very prepared or hasn't done their homework, as it goes. Most things are quite predictable. Seismic tremors, and the spewing of volcanoes excepted. What a normal person needs to do is just pass along through things, letting them happen, and that's pretty much it, the sum total of life itself. - I was always a big believer in the totality of numbers, and their closure. By that I mean to say, it always seemed to me that people already had, when born, their own natural numbers to be fulfilled. It's very difficult here for me to put into words, but, let's say, if a person is born with some categorical signifier that adds up to, oh, 10,349,045 (random number), then somewhere within the makeup of their personal activities (unknown to each of us), the amounts that they deal with, as well, eventually come up to so...