RUDIMENTS

RUDIMENTS, pt. 87 Making Cars I can recollect lots of things but I never am sure if a recollection is to be seen as a memory. There's probably a slight difference in the relational reality between the two; perhaps akin to 'tasting' an orange, versus just finding an old shirt still soaked with the wet juice of an orange. So I can never be sure which of the two it is that I'm dealing with, though both are real to me. Maybe a recollection is the one done in quiet tranquility; which the memory still throws up, its heat and steam of the moment remembered. Over in Towanda, PA, for instance  -  a place I remember well and have in fact again re-visited a Spring or two back  -  there's an old bandstand in the middle of the town lawn  -  it's mostly nothing now, all the nice paint and detailing having been removed, and replaced by a merely 'modern' efficiency, easy to be kept up, painted, and maintained by town work...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 86 Making Cars Some way or another I was determined to make my life a study hall. That was it. That was about all I learned from school too. Except for lies and obfuscation, what good was all that? The main thing they tried to do was socialize you, into other versions of a useful citizen  -  which basically meant a go-along slave. You work all these years, I use to think, to develop a character of your own, and the first thing they want you to do once you're done is jettison it. I met a guy once who said to me, 'Son, whatever you do, don't do it if it's theirs.' And then the rest of his point was that it was all theirs, I'd learn that soon enough, and they were all killers out to stifle, smother, and then kill me, or whatever spark there was in me. So, yeah, that guy knew his stuff. When I was in New York City for every five people I knew who worked, I probably knew three who didn't. It was just th...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 85 Making Cars I started out the previous chapter with a complete other idea in mind, but never got there. Basically, that just usually means it wasn't worth much anyway. However, the manner in which I write has everything meaning something, so I go where it takes me. I am, by the way, and have always been the writing-workshop's worst nightmare. And boy do I hate those things  -  workshops, not nightmares. Quintessentially feminine, usually even the guys, in that vein, nothing is ever questioned except as it gets questioned for its propriety, correctness, and right-attitude. Which ain't writing at all; that's polemic, that's ideology. So, I never knew what that crap was all about, and usually told them, which most generally  -  in those pre-laptop days  -  got me a pencil in the eye. More than once. So, you see, they blinded me. But I told them 'I can see better blind, so shut up now and let me wri...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 84 Making Cars There are a few things that still jump out at me as really aberrational. I was in the middle of nowhere, working in  an environment unknown to me, at first: chickens to cows to pigs and sheep. We walked around doing 'chores'  -  which is what farmers call the constant, and steady, routine of twice a day milling  and everything else with it, that goes  with dairy farming. It was never easy,  and never anything that let a person  just coast or skate along. The herd takes constant attention, milk, manure, hay, feed, drainage, cleaning, spreading the manure onto the fields, planting those fields later, tending to growth, turning it into silage and feed, and then harvesting the crop, whichever crop it was for that  time period. And the farmer had his pick: Spring wheat in one field would mean an early harvest, and hopefully an early payoff. Corn went until late September. So...