RUDIMENTS

RUDIMENTS, pt. 452 (the glass bead game too) A life, any life, one simple life, is filled with paradoxes. To get farthest away from it, often you have to get as close to it as possible; letting it smother and subsume you. Regret, shame, mistakes, they all arise, like green grass and the shape of clouds. There's nothing to be done, really. Bite the lower lip and move along, blessing those who may have cursed you along the way. - I spend an inordinate amount of my time studying. I don't mind it, and in fact I look forward to it. The most difficult part about it all is how it divorces me from the reality of that which other people live. I have little in common when I hear the usual offhand things. No idea, sorry. Sopranos? Grey Gardens? Six Feet Under? Some Hillbilly family that looks like me and hordes junk? When people come at me from those directions, and a lot do, I just often pretend I'm reading lips and...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 451 (avenel - green with envy) When I was a kid it always seemed like the prim and proper side of me had to be up front and center. That got pretty boring, quick. I maybe sometimes felt as if I wanted to lash out. It's tiresome being strait-jacketed all the time. On the whole nothing ever came of it and everyone always  thought I was well-behaved  and nice. Yeah, good for that.  My grandmother always said  I was the image of Roddy  McDowell to her. When I  did finally find out who  that was I was appalled : some weak-knee'd little kid in How Green Was My Valley.  Nothing I ever understood or cared about, and then one day in like 1968 or '69 my friends showed me a movie called The Loved One (based on a story by Evelyn Waugh, I think) and that same McDowell person had the  lead. I think it was the lead, and he was pretty transformed, a different sort of person, or a dif...

RUDIMENTS, pt. 450 (homing in again : iselin tabloids) I was never surreptitious anything : all that I did by the time of this long demise  of Iselin, of which I've been speaking, was done out in the open. I don't know quite how it all happened, but there came a time when I couldn't pee and not have someone at my elbow. It's really not that much fun to have to do everything and go everywhere with 14 others. Even though I always enjoyed it all, and all my friends were great, it wore me down sometimes to  have to be tending to every little thing. I was a pretty hard, fearless (and stupid) rider, and my friend Neil scolded me more than once about having to stop the shit, the cutting lanes fast, the breaking between cars, the slipstreaming, because others would follow my lead, not quite as skillfully, and the penalties would be deadly mistakes. (Yeah, motorcycles are very unforgiving). I'd  have another beer and...