THE END OF ENCHANTMENT IS THE BEGINNING OF USELESSNESS

155. THE END OF ENCHANTMENT IS THE BEGINNING OF USELESSNESS:

Well that's my ending - I suppose - and everything I could have taken from that time and episode I guess I did and life goes on and here I am 4th stool from the left counter by the window West 13th Street and all its fellows rolling by like some diorama of intensity with actors all playing their parts and no James Dean no more no Dennis Hopper no Actor's Studio bullshit none of that just the lame and the ugly as real as they are - staggering by or limping and pulling carts or nothing at all the old world resounds and the fevered new light of this one trying to replace that one and a few trucks slide into loading bays - the backwards and the sideways of cargo skid and package the Puerto Ricans and the black guys yelling back and forth like the fountains of some stupid Rome and the east Asians and Indians with their fabric shops and quality bullshit jewelry and nickel-plated crap and plastic and this and that radios blaring suitcases of sunglasses and scarves and wraps hats and umbrellas pretzel-carts the errant horse guy pulling some twisted wagon painted red white and blue the magazine truck with nowhere to go the few girls venturing out all powdered and sweet for something and from something else the coffee shop with three benches along the glass the school nearby for lacksadaisical kids the mothers who won't leave and the fathers who never stay - somehow it all works out and I listen to the clink of ceramic coffee cups smashing into each other near the wash-sink while the waitress with the pencil divides up some small green check where three men have been eating hatless in their business suits and the world is aplomb the squiggles are all set the days roll into each other - pushing one out of the way of the other and ten thousand people speak but nothing is said for time has its lock on the windows and doors and there's really no appreciation of anything at all - the now the then nor any of the moments we share - and I realize it all somehow again and over again and understand how it all must continue and time just goes on with or without whomever you're with and 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' if they still say that but I never heard of 'fonder' it should probably be 'more fond' but Rutherford would know that but he's gone and no matter because he'd say it however he wanted to anyway - rightly wrongly or in between - and the day he died I went up in the room with two cops and a forensics guy to show them how he kept his stuff and because I knew him well they asked me questions and the only thing we found - out of place and odd - was this note he'd somehow left addressed to me : '...I mean everybody lives in the same nightmare they just react to it in different ways and at different times yet the news is always bad and you have to live with that - it was the same in Plato's day - and what you're looking at is a human being which is essentially an experiment that failed and it's an evolutionary leap that's probably not going to work and unfortunately it knows it's not going to work but that's part of the appeal like some Frankenstein's monster - you know the look in the monster's eyes that says it knows it's hideous and deformed and is a creature who is going to throw little girls into the river but who would LIKE to be better - and that's pretty much us and all we do is move forward because there isn't any backward for us and there's no earlier state we can return to the genie's out of this bottle for sure and faraway and anyway the WORST people always end up on top in any group of humans the kind of tribal primitive creatures who crawl over the others to get to that top (some sickening valueless heap which only they value anyway) and they're the ones then that call the shots - throwing garbage out the window shitting in any corner of the field they choose befouling the land and choking the common good - and any organism like that is irretrievably bound to end up fucked-up and the history of human art and the history of human pain is all about this and with people coming up with crap like 'the lesson of history is that nobody learns the lesson of history' yeah well bullcrap to that and I'm done and a hail and a salvation to you all ! I leave you with this note and stick it up your ass for all I care for what we've got is apes with power drills still thinking like savages but savages with technology and we can't deal with the consequences of what we've discovered and we're the species from Hell on a tear and a rampage and there's nothing but blackness and fear and death ahead and I'll see you wherever we go but it's got to be a damned sight better than this and I'm rather looking forward to the journey itself.'