THROWING UP FROM THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND

82. THROWING UP FROM THE SLOUGH OF DESPOND:

"I can get myself up but not up off the ground and if I did you'd have to know anyway that I'd support your cause the way a tree limb supports a rope at a hanging - all that and not much more" I said that to the guy at Union Square handing out leaflets for some cause or another – something about ending war stop brutality bring the troops home now and all that crap without meaning and he just looked at me squarely and smiled some stupefied dumb ass smile the sort of smile these people always make the Union Square Time Killers I call them for that’s all they are – wasted young stupid kids irresponsible and waiting for some more of their support money to come from one or another or both parents so they can continue their respite from real life a little bit more and then they all turn out anyway to be huge corporate wastes-of-time ladder-climbers ass-kissers lovers of procedure anyway or if not that then vapid archaic advertising whores people selling shit and talking the same and I’d have much rather punched the asshole right in the face but figured he’d cry : and then – again just like that – I turned around and went right back to him and said (just before walking away) "did you know that Aristophanes’s Lysistrata said that women do so well at logic because they have all that experience detangling and delousing – whereas men (who are after all impatient creatures) just like to wave their shields around…"
-
Mother Mary Mathilda McCree – if she were running for President – herself couldn’t do any worse than what scenes I’ve seen thrown up on the moving screen of circumstance lately – they’ve taken down the oldest wall in Chelsea and painted the remnants pink they’ve shuttered the back doors of the old hotel and barricaded the loonies inside and the guy behind the counter at Quixote still grimaces every time someone new comes in BECAUSE in his mind he’s supposed to believe that HE knows everyone or believes that he’s SUPPOSED to know every one - which concept by the way is outrageous and cuts one out of a really lot of chance happenings in a city like this - closed mind shuttered brain little grasp of reality and all that…BUT no matter there because that’s what’s ended up of the society we once had and if it weren’t for anything else I’d just shut my eyes and coast out to sea from some eastside pier but the problem now is there’s not so many of them left anyway and the sea has started to stink (and speaking of stink listen to this litany) : SECTION A SUBJECT 7 - [things I've heard in passing] : A. 'if wishes were horses beggars would ride' B. 'all energy is of a sexual nature - not mainly but EXCLUSIVELY - and when the animal is no longer good for reproducing it is absolutely no longer good for anything' C. 'consumer capitalism has turned youth into a supremely desirable commodity and has little by little destroyed respect for tradition and the cult of the ancestors - inasmuch as it promised the indefinite preservation of this same youth and the pleasures associated with it' D. (an explanation given by someone of the reason for his nausea at the sight of a seedy street whore at his ready) 'overwhelmed by the pestilential odor that rose from between her thighs - a mixture of the musty smell of shit and rotten fish' E. 'you are a near autistic container of affective emptiness' : and the sea really HAS started to sink - shoals turned to flamed piles of dead shells huge fish washed up with enormous eyes slowly blinking in some wonder of a strange circumstance horseshoe crabs in lots of twenty dead and dry on the white-hot sand and flies in hundreds buzz in for the carcass field and all the while - at the Yacht Club atop the bluff - people sit at tables drinking cocktails in the open-air and gazing out to sea they wistfully speak to each other of things which have passed or their deals yet to come and the frequent sea breezes soothe their faces and the swirly gulls go swirling by while down below others walk along the walkway - stern or easy - looking out to sea themselves or watching jellyfish and schools of fish below the water line - just almost opaque - invisibly scurry through green-grey water and still no matter what else I can sense I am in a foreign land some place of another accent and another people altogether and it's all about seeing and it's all about hearing and observing that which is and it's MAYBE MOST all about BEING somewhere I have chosen to be.