SO PLAY ME OFF YOUR HAND

169. SO PLAY ME OFF YOUR HAND (nyc, 1967):

Nothing kills quicker than misplaced faith and it's the slowest quick ever and I knew that and so remained wary of believing things I'd hear - those stupid preachers belting out choruses of 'must-do' on the streetcorners and the tightly-wound black guys haranguing passers-by while dressed themselves almost as bizarre eccentric businessmen and trying to sell copies of Muhammed Speaks to a blacks-only audience (all bizarre all twisted and weird - this cultural undercurrent of black separatism fronted for by the disenfranchised trying to adapt military discipline and businessman clothing-success in a world where those attributes were supposed to have been meaningless : I never got that and it all seemed a mad parody of itself unfortunately in a time before humor) and nuns in their habits trying to walk like angels along dirty streets and black Cadillacs slowly perusing the pickings along the avenues and crazy sports names plastered on storefront windows and newspaper back pages : Bill Mazerowski Carl Yastremski Moose Skowren Bob Gibson Harvey Haddix Louis Aparicio Clete Boyer Stan Musial Tom Tresh and the rest : in the sit-down booth at the 38th Street record store I'd listen to Robert Johnson singing about Ella Speed and I'd just sit there and think about what I was hearing - the thin sound of a really strange voice from another time and place for sure but someone trying hard to put across sentiments and feelings I just never really understood - try as I might to think I did - and it was hard to fathom these distances the big spaces of places and times once existent but now separated by the great gulf of story-line and circumstance internal factions wars and battles : I remembered a guy telling me once about his great grandaddy a drinker who was 'killed - shot through the head one day while toasting'... this was where I got screwed up because I never learned exactly what he meant to say - toasting 'this Union forever' or 'disunion forever' - but for one or the other of those two phrases this guy's great grandaddy had been shot as a Blue or Gray I never found out but a good story nonetheless it was and another time I remembered dreaming of myself at a huge banquet table filled with people and food and someone approaching me carrying a huge platter of meat and asking of me 'white meat or dark matter?' - which to me immediately was a great theoretical physics joke/reference and at about that time I'd been reading exactly on that subject (dark matter) at the time a new and cutting-edge theoretical cosmic theory in the field of quantum physics and it was all like that - all people who were never here and things which never really existed to me as I spent my days and nights in a bizarre theoretical world of figment chimera and might-have-beens and might-be's and a rich field and exalted one too - I remained thereby aloof and quite happy distant and sound.
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Life itself had a big duplicity to itself anyway as if it was broken and sundered by new things rushing in and breaking up the old - maybe duality would be a better word - and everything was (and is) exactly (first) what it IS first and then (second) what it is called and those two items don't always rightly coincide and thus the duplicity or duality and commonality of all life is underscored : would you rather have more 'tality' or less? : (mortality joke) and totality of course has to be worked in at that point but the fluid and changing nature of everything I saw in New York City in those years - literally - gave the lie to any feelings or ideas of security or settled-field or static scenery and that in turn effected everything else AGAIN a great flux and a flow of change and alteration everywhere.