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Good As Any
The piece I lost last night was the greatest piece in the history of mankind, and yet my disappointment at the loss, as I stared at the frozen screen, and jiggled the mouse maniacally, was less than phenomenal. What was I going to do? Blame my reliance on new fangled technology? Of course not. It could have just as well been written on a shovel blade with coal and my kind hearted wife might have let the neighbor borrow that shovel to deepen the pit for his outhouse, my inspired thoughts smeared away in deference to a higher purpose.
I believe I was attempting to offer an opinion on The Beat Generation, or that's what it sounded like before the crash. Starting out my point was only going to bring up that I never realized the number of suspicious deaths related to that group: Lucien Carr killing that dude in NY and dumping him in the river; Kerouac helping him get rid of the guy's eyeglasses; and although I had heard the "Burroughs in Mexico shooting the glass off wife Joan's head, and missing," story many times I did not know until recently that she had initiated a love affair with this Lucien Carr character shortly before. Well, Burroughs was gay so it couldn't have been jealously that made him a less than crack shot that night, or why couldn't it have been? And the "suicide" of one of Neal Cassady's many wives made my eyebrows rise, but that's besides the point. Yesterday I never really got to the suspicious deaths part which in my mind was somehow going to eloquently segue into my own On the Road experience in '60 or '61 as a toddler in South Oak Cliff hell bent for the highway, or East Kiest Blvd. But I didn't get to tell it before the crash and I'm not telling it now. Stevie Ray Vaughn and Lee Harvey Oswald would have had bit parts in the story as if you needed more reasons to beg me to tell the story, but no, I order you, like you a dog, to quit that begging, and I mean no disrespect oh dear audience but discipline is freedom and you will all do well to remember that.
Anyway, it was an inspired piece, unlike this, which is me grinding to the tune "discipline is freedom," if you hum a few bars I'll be annoyed.
I am almost finished insulating over at Rocheblave and will probably order the sheetrock this weekend. I was going to hire out the hanging and finishing but now I think I prefer to do most of it myself and just hire out the hanging of the ceiling because I'm too tired and arthritic to do that even with a decent helper which is hard to find sometimes. I think I'm going to have to buy that small lot next to me for an exaggerated price so doing instead of hiring out the sheetrock work will save me a few bucks towards that eventuality.
Shelton will be moving out soon to go live with his sister, Tesa (Erica's mom), and her new husband, and family (he has some other kids), but not Erica, she's living with Aunt Gwynn in the Seventh Ward. They will attempt to restart the SSI payments of five bills a month, which Mandy had discontinued to underscore her platform that Shelton was not a commodity to her but a human being she cared about and wanted to see do well in this difficult world into which he was born. But whereas she may have coddled him at times (by hugging him and buying him Nikes?) in the years previous to his living here, there were a few standards she set for him as a resident of 2646 that probably got a good guffaw from father destiny. She was not pretending to be an unconditionally loving mother. There were one or two cardinal rules, he broke them, he's gone.
And despite the fact I was not strictly in favor of his living here, I wish him well and hope his super charged spirit, and temper, and ability to see the world clearly, will not lead him to see that the ruinous alternative is as good as any.
Wishing you could make a difference is not enough, and the attempt itself might be only so much vainglory, but to just sit on your blanket and watch and be confounded by those damn ants, ocassionally squishing a generation or two because of your dominion, is probably inexcusable. But as all of us are on the exact same path towards dust we the most of us can probably get by quite well with our indifference and ineffectuality. That's what I'm hoping.