I really want to get this going....

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Friday, October 05, 2007

ROLAND

175. ROLAND (nyc, 1968)

Over time it came as no surprise to me that I was alive and I learned to talk to people reasonably well whenever I had to - I would strike a pose as a marauder or wildman or someone caught up in something - art words thoughts ideas philosophy - SOMETHING anyway they'd probably not connect to except in the most distant way and it all went along good enough for me as I stayed both moving and in one place at the same time : twenty-five cent muffins and knishes and coffee and oatmeal and anything else needed - which never was very much - and I managed to survive just like the best of them by wringing out the most from the least and swinging every moment from its own rafter - forcing the issue whenever I had to and my best friends were probably loneliness and absurdity together (what a trio!) and wherever I was they were too - the old tugboat guy Roland from Norway or somewhere with his enormous jacket and soggy boots and he always sucked on a pipe and smelled of the harbor and diesel fuel and kerosene and gasoline and grease all mixed together - a truly amazing smell actually which mixed with the pipe aroma he emitted so that all together he seemed to me completely foreign and from a far other land - he'd park himself down along the end of Canal Street where there used to be a bridge and the elevated highway and beneath all that - amidst the twisted shadows of the road and girders and the dark slants of a lowered afternoon sun across the island - we'd sit there for an hour or two at a time while he waited for an arrival tug or whatever to take him away and he'd talk to me in the most absolute real and adult fashion I'd ever heard about absolute real and solid things - things with no gray or conditional or even philosophical areas - engines hoists car parts industrial matters leverages and power winches cranes and boats and tugs and barges just all regular workaday stuff all of which simply made up his world as if nothing else ever had existed and he'd know nothing of values or marginalities or shadings of right or wrong and the long old lure of philosophy and drama and logic and tact and all of that other-worldly-by-comparison stuff was outside the realm of whatever he lived : totally in ignorance of the fact that the cosmos and the world might be composed of anything other than iron and steel he'd wander on verbally oblivious to anything else and I'd listen and learn and talk and it all went around.

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