RUDIMENTS

RUDIMENTS, PT. 1,151 (great matters, born) Real simple. I was not looking for anything really; just intent on making my own way along the scaffolding I'd been erecting, upon which to pin the later structure of my own life. I didn't really know where any of it was headed. It was maybe 1966, Winter, maybe December. I'm not sure. As I said, I didn't have a sure feed on what was going on around me. Like it was said by DeNiro  -  'I hear things.' There were oddball reports about society, coming out of strange places. Dylan was in Australia, talking about American baseball? A transit strike in NYC, led by some bizarre Irish guy, Michael Quill? It was all brash effrontery. - And then, one day, sometime I think in 1966, the first chink fell into place. I had never been a TV guy, hit and miss at most, I was somewhere, and I saw on a TV a very striking, white horse mini-movie or something I didn't know of. I...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,150 (a constant movie, repeating) Sometimes it seems all I ever do is sit around writing. Reading. All that literary stuff. I never know why. I'm tired of that sort of crowd, though it's a crowd of one. Me. For the rest, it's all about missionary things: Causes. Effects. The old college bookstore I remember now resembles nothing so much as a Red Cross ward trying to do good. Profit motives notwithstanding. I'm sick of the good. I'm sick of the cadaverous world that allows that stuff. How do any of those people get on with themselves? Everywhere one looks, some sort of false crystal hail is falling. - Mostly, our world is structured falsely too. We start our 'History' with a Biblical reckoning, and that's that; even as 'Science' and research disproves that time-frame completely  -  showing it to be without sense, and artificial too. Yet,as Civilization, we bank on it. - ...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,149 (tomorrow I start with King David) I'd always figured that the one thing a man - or any person  - had to do was make peace with his or herself, come to terms, find that 'point' as it were - Where things settle, and much of the strife is gone. My father, speaking from my own experience, never attained that. There was always a personal struggle at the forefront, whether anger or just anxiety. He was always at it with someone, over something. I, yes, tried walking away from all that, and hopefully I've succeeded, but once that sort of genetic gets established, it's difficult to be rid off. Everyone's got something of that to deal with. - You know how, growing up, or at some later point, there'd always be some old guy around to whom people referred as that 'nice, calm, old man.' I knew a few; always doing nice things, for others, with a smile, willingly, peaceful, settled, an...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,148 (words were never enough) The 'myth' of mythology had always led me along  -  to believing that I'd see griffins, two-headed monsters, dragons that breathed fire, and flighty wood-nymphs too. None of it ever happened, of course, but I still believed. For a normal, hetero-sexual guy (and I say normal' because, yes, sorry to say, I believe that to be the right and natural way; all you same-sexers can talk this over amongst yourselves. Sorry), the deliverance from any of that mythology stuff always seemed, for me, to be the liberation of the female body, or form. There was never anything better for me, so I ran with that as the best of all mythology, the feminine-form divine. (Hey! Maybe then that makes ME a lesbian? Does that get a capital 'L' yet, by the way?). - In its prideful notations to the modern day, modern Humankind rebuffs all those 'mythological' beasts and beings,...

RUDIMENTS, pt 1,147 (the ground : only the ground In a few other languages the word for 'ant' is 'formica.' That always surprised me, inasmuch as for us here, using English, it meant nothing of the sort. I always got confused about the crossover of words, like the Chevy Nova, basically meaning, in a Spanish usage, 'no go.' When I was young, after first moving to Avenel, probably no more than a year or two after being there, my parents did the bottom half of the kitchen (walls) over in some odd wall covering that, in 1956 parlance, was called 'Sanitest.' The idea being cleanliness and washability, as in 'Sanitary.' It was an ugly wall covering of some sort of pliable but hard material, which could be washed down, swabbed, etc., to remove finger stains, smudges, etc. Beats me what anyone was thinking. I never liked the stuff besides, and it had an ugly tan-based pattern of squiggles on it...