RUDIMENTS

RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,125 (it felt like nothing at all) Whenever I watched a crafts guy at work, it always seemed the eyes were intent on the work being done. None of that noise or extraneous excitement of conversation or small talk. They stayed with their work, it always appeared as with an unbroken intention. That was probably good, because distractions make detractions : crummy work, missed steps, half measures. It's always a good thing to take note of that when looking at a shop-guy working. Surgeons too, I'd guess. Plenty of quiet in the O.R.  - Lots of places now, in my own recent past anyway, are set-up with noise. Sound-systems, radios blaring, or some other form of audio-attack. It unsettles everything. The mind can't really be fully in two places at once, and 100% remains just that, 100%. It can't be cut. I remember lots of the silences in those small shops and stables and things, along the west side. Whe...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,124 (a vast otherwise nothing) Having to do with that same subject  -  the 'natural' aspects of NYC  -  water always played a large role in what I saw and understood of NY. On many levels. First was the whole Croton Reservoir thing and the huge engineering of the aqueduct, which is still in place way uptown, and which can be walked now too. There's a great book I read once, back in Princeton, called 'Water For Gotham,' that covers that perfectly. The history of water in Manhattan is an amazing. Let me digress: - Some of my best times, through the early 2000's were my early morning Princeton hours. Woodrow Wilson is getting kicked around now like a turd-football, but his house, as President of the University, still proudly stands  -  and don't let any of those of today's Princeton snivelers confuse you; they still revere him there, treat his legacy like gold, and are otherwise, ge...

RUDIMENTS, pt 1,123 (better yet,  just go on) There were always a million things, or so it seemed, rattling against each other inside my head. It was 'touch and go, where to turn, what should I do?' kind of stuff. One time I can remember hooking up with some local friend whose Chippewa mother grew wild rice, out in Minnesota or maybe Wisconsin, I can't remember. Her daughter thought then we could maybe place it for sale in the local Second Ave. natural foods store, just off St. Marks. So we go in there one day and start talking to one of the owners. The idea was OK, yeah, but the incidentals killed us. Shows how naive I was  -  he started to mention all the things against us - if he said yes to us  -  getting it here, first off, and incurring that expense; packaging, even if it was to be sold there in bulk in one of his rice barrels as Minnesota wild rice, we'd first have to put it in something secure to get i...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,122 (clearing roads and cleaning ramps) Without all these normal failings hype and commerce and overblown balderdash -  when you come right down to it  -  I don't think America would have turned out the sort of miserable nation it is now. There's a sweeping disease, and I don't mean this Covid crap, that over time has swept through and ruined everything. If you had, ever, an uncle in the advertising business, an aunt in finance or retail selling and service, a family member as a scientist who worked on, not pure science, but developing product, your lineage too is suspect. And I want reparations for a ruined land and life and place, for you have done this to. - Just after the Civil War most things began turning over. For those, of course, who were here then. For the others, of my ilk, whose waves of people came later on,in all those arrivals of packed ships and boats and steerage, this raw land was ju...