Now at seventy years old and a bunch of months. For the most part feeling decades earlier? How to save one’s self from descending from the possibility of obtaining fresh thoughts, the brain being under constant duress, into constant skull numbing harangue? To say that in times of social evolution totally collapsing to ashes can their be any meaning left beyond survival at all costs? Herds of of disturbed sheep in one’s path.
“Get me a knife!“, the professor said. I was visiting a large university and was walking on the campus grounds killing time on a series of walkways that were fairly heavily forested. I was waiting to find a professor who ended up texting me. Or perhaps was it, leaving a message on my phone asking me to get him a knife. I ended up by a kitchen that was just off the path but found that all the knives were locked up save for two industrial looking chopping knives that were hung up upon the wall in a cabinet. To my surprise standing before a window that was partially open, a hand came through presenting me with regular butter knife which I subsequently took without a question. Before turning to go back out to the commons, I was able to find a fork as a mate. And there stood the professor, to whom I then handed this combination. Quite frankly it did not make me happy to have been invited there to be immediately presented with such a menial task before being initially introduced to this person.
A close friend uses her influence to get me a personal introduction to someone big who could get me a job as a railroad engineer. We go to a party where I am introduced to one executive that hands me off to another who tells his assistant to teach me how to use a throttle and see how I do. The man comments back to his boss, “Don’t worry, he won’t strip the gears!” So then I found myself in the guise of a detective trying to clean up the city. A trap was laid at the junkyard for me and someone else. I was there trying to find some stolen goods. It was a very clever trap because they left one of their own there hogtied by a car with a gag in his mouth. When I went up to another vehicle just across it was obvious by the lack of concern in this victim’s eyes that there was no trap there. But there was also an old panel van some feet away with its back poised towards the car with this trussed up fellow laying prone before it. His eyes now showing some concern whenever I approached its back doors. It was obvious that the plot was already thickening.
One of the keys to this mystery came in the form of signs on a series of gas stations under the brand name signage of one Bernice Fellowville. The rotating sign sporting the effigy of a rooster. A coincidence that helped narrow the list of perpetrators down to a few. A receptacle, the sensation of heavy weight, the insecurity of increasing pain, yet still happy to embrace that which I should hate. I find myself sitting in a room of strangers in total darkness by a desk. I have a camera on a tripod trying to take a picture of something before that was on the desk left by some woman. The feint glow makes me wonder if the camera is projecting light or the missing item was something like a TV projecting a latent image. In any case there is this woman, a young woman probably in her twenties that has supposedly been sent there to help me. I didn’t ask for help but she has none the less been provided to help. What the hell this means, I have no idea? Except that now she is there, she is not helping at all.
The camera almost gets knocked off the tripod, in part through my own inattentiveness, because now I am distracted by her antics as she tries to help. I don’t particularly need to have her talk, and I don’t particularly need to have her give the advice. But the reason the camera is now off kilter is because I rejected her and she got angry and she knocked into the camera. Maybe it was on purpose? And maybe it wasn’t? In any case, I kinda wish she would disappear. And of course, the kinda wishes that I would disappear. This is her way of helping. And this is also the ‘modern’ way of helping. This is bullshit. But this is only my observation. My observation at this point is very incidental to the conversation because I am old and she is young. And never the twain are supposed to meet anymore.
One portion of this movie about a movie I recall seeing earlier is about guilty Jews. The protagonist being ‘fucked’ by his completely indifferent Jewish female that brings back a memory of my own from way back in my own past. I recall going out one night after the end of another failed love affair having not bathed or shaved wearing some old sweaty smelly clothes. And I picked up this Jewish woman at a bar and brought her home and we fucked all night like animals. Maybe the best fuck of my life! Or maybe the best recounted fuck of my life? I found out every much later that much to my horror having not seen her since that she was pregnant. This same woman had taken up residence in the back portion of my building all the while without me knowing. I could even see her apartment out of my own kitchen window. The first words out of her mouth when I had spied her down by the end of the alley with a big belly were, “Don’t worry , it’s not yours!“
But was it mine? What was going on? I never got a full explanation but I got the impression that she had been dissatisfied by a previous situation with another lover. And she had ended up fucking me. But yet she ended up in that apartment? Did it make any sense? Was this such a strange rendezvous? I’ve had other situations like that. In another similar situation I broke up with a woman who I later realized that I should have married when I was in college. Drunk and abandoned by her I ended up being taken care of by another strange woman in the same dormitory that I barely knew. The news traveled around that I spent the night in her bed recovering and I lost the other. At the end I was bitterly cursed by her a year later when she graduated. And from that point romantically speaking, my world was never the same.
I suppose that in one way or another, everyone wants to be appreciated. To be recognized and have a niche for which they are accorded respect and appreciation. If you don’t have that you are likely to end up a hermit. You get hard to deal with by the reckoning of the outside world because of a dismissive nature. Something that acts as a defense against accusations, against criticisms, against all manner of exterior stimuli of your own kind. You get weird. You do things beyond the comprehension of a noter career followers out there who are technically just as perverse as you. Those who wish to not be accused of something rightfully so. But then. it is all a matter of appreciation.
‘Barthees‘ was the nickname of a small group in England. One which produced stories which they published about their own Soccer club. The stories didn’t attract a big volume of business but they were well-respected. And as their contenders were never completely in awe of their achievements, perhaps of them felt that they should have been? At one point, going to a junior high in Skokie when a bunch of Matzo eaters on high holidays were caught short desperately wanting to trade for my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and I, caving in to occasionally trade. I can’t recall if I took advantage? But given the circumstance, I should have! And then in dreamland much later, somehow I had a boat that I had bought and was getting fixed up. I had a bunch of people working on it. Towards the end, a youngish looking woman comes climbing down the ladder. I knew she was working on checking and stowing the flags. I asked her is all the flags were all set up and stowed in the locker. And she just said, ‘Yeah‘. But, it made me wonder!
So, where was the spiritual in all of this? Sex is supposed to be so forbidden in the old Western world. The devils of the Earth and Gods slash scions of the sky. If you are a ‘good little boy‘ and please them then you get to float up to their heaven. But if not then you just get put in the ground. It is always that latent fear of death that drives horror of something that might take you there with it. It is this inevitability that keeps them potent. The inevitability that the physical form will deteriorate one day and leave you as refuse in the eyes the rest of the world. Whatever lasting inspiration within will be ‘pssst‘, be gone! And then what? And if you are not a good little boy or girl, what happens then? If you fall in love with the flesh of the material world then you are likely to stay there. But what of those other worlds behind these?
So I pull up to this porno art house. It was dark within its auditorium. The aisles were really wide. The picture that was playing was up front, just over to the right. I dropped a packet of my own photos upon a coat laying on a chair. I go to pick it up and find that instead I now have another clear packet of someone else’s photos. Without thinking I stuff a couple of more images of mine in some of the empty sleeves. I notice that the picture that belong are of a ravishing naked blond. The woman sitting in the next seat over is the same on in these photos. Her expression being of the type that was streetwise and didn’t take any shit. I began to worry a little that she might think I was trying to purposely snatch her pictures and abscond with them. I put them in my pocket but did not attempt to escape. I simply laid down upon the floor and looked at the ceiling as if stunned or in a haze of some sort.
‘Joke‘ Park, as it was called, just south of Madison was a family diner. Simine, my ex-wife was getting married again. The several unopened packages with French labels lay on the booth’s bench told me that she had just flown in from Paris. The diner was owned by one of her relatives. And now, I knew that I wouldn’t be going there anymore! I walked out and up the block towards the main drag seeing an old bookstore leveraged in between a block of apartments along the way. It made me kind of sad when I realized it was named, ‘Myopic‘. I looked down at the sidewalk as another person passed me by heading the other direction. And then I saw a beat up triangular metal change purse laying there completely abandoned. I picked it up and quickly cracked it open a bit to see some bills inside, but then quickly palmed it close while I went walking on. I didn’t want to open it up all the way to count the money because I knew that someone would come running over to try to claim it. As I walked across a dirt filled city lot a big dog came running up. He was friendly. The all of a sudden what looked like another much larger dog took off from the distance in my direction. It turned out to be a man on a horse. I looked up and said, “That’s amazing! You don’t see a horse in this town anymore!“, as I just kept walking on soon feeling very sad. Later, at a neighborhood that was completely foreign to me I was asleep in my car within another abandoned parking lot. I had been sleeping all night behind the steering wheel. No one was around as I stirred awake just in time to find something very small falling from my mouth. One of my canine teeth had unexpectedly dislodged. And as I held it in my hand I noticed that it was very hollow out and polished. I said, ‘Oh Great‘, as I thought, ‘Another sign of how old I had become!‘