THE MAN IN THE BLUE COAT (some small-town words

228. THE MAN IN THE BLUE COAT (some small-town words):

The guy with the blue coat said he was going to send me something but I always knew him to be a liar so I never expected much and he'd once told me he lived 'by the water with the blue spruce on the shoreline' and that sounded too pat for me to believe for I knew him to live adjacent to the canal where all the junk lumber had been dumped and where people dropped off washers and bicycles and other crap they didn't want and if he thought that was any sort of paradisaical existence for anyone he was surely nuts (the old tan-stucco boarding house was still standing but ready to fall in and had been vacant except for him for at least thirty years and it once held the canal workers who hauled the cargo which passed through from Philadelphia to Manhattan or wherever that stuff ended up and it all went in either direction anyway and they were all gone now and if he had any neighbors at all they were sure to be rats or rodents) and just over the hill from him in Liberty or whatever they called it now was the slimy graveyard where they buried all these people - old tottering stones from the 1800's and then the latest ones the newest or the most recent anyway - cut from a different stone entirely and bereft of anything cool to say - all the etchings of the latest ones being nothing but boring dates and names and such while the old ones with their cherubs and willow trees and angels adorning names and dates often too were held in groups with interesting sayings and slogans and epitaphs that were fun to read but "you're supposed to be sad in a graveyard not happy" was what he said to me when I mentioned this to him and now there's nothing there anyway except for some stupid farmer who has hours on Saturdays from 10AM to 4PM when he sells 'small dogs and puppies' whatever that exactly means - and I always wanted to get there and see for myself and maybe get a dog or a small dog at least or a puppy if they're not the same thing but his sign was always confusing to me and it never mentioned price so I never went - dogs being quite plentiful it seemed anywhere else you could look and I'd rather they were free anyway (that's a double meaning too FREE for me - as it were - and free for themselves to wander to roam and to run around unfettered) but the guy with the blue coat played the harmonica too and the dulcimer or zither or one of those old instruments that no one understands anymore and I'd see him sometimes a little farther off at the edge of the parkland by the water-bridge playing some soulful sad tune to himself - since no one else was ever around - and I'd figure right then that LIAR OR NOT he really was probably right about the graveyard.
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And then like some unsought-for pterodactyl he would suddenly seem to come to life and be around everywhere I went - like some hillbilly in disguise with a flannel shirt for parents and two mud-boots for twin sisters he'd just be there hanging around listening and misunderstanding and then misrepresenting things and talking out of turn and he'd never read a newspaper - he said - that he could believe and even the 'car ads were mostly wrong' but he'd sit around eating candy and hard rolls whenever he found them to be available and the crusty old people at the general store down the patch by the river bend started taking to him and letting him in on rainy days and the like and he'd become a fixture at Busby's General that no one ever flinched anymore even if he came in covered in concrete and cement dust and with big patches of dried stucco and paste stuck onto his shirt - as long as he could still talk he would - and then he started smelling as bad as he looked but no one would ever tell him but there WERE people (it was said - after a while) who wanted him dead and who'd talked about shooting him during hunting season or mistaking him for a deer or whatever (but I said "whoever saw a deer with a fluorescent-orange farmer's cap on?") and then they'd argue over where to put the body or how to dump his remains (and I'd say "take him back home in your wagon and dump his dead ass in the corner of that shit-shack he's living in and leave him there covered with leaves for a month or two until some bear or animal gets him and then blame that - NO ONE ever convicts Mother Nature!" and they laughed me off and said "shut up or there'll be two to kill") so I did and - maimed stupid or dead or not - I began seeing much less of him after this sort of talk got around.
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But people always told me it's like that in small towns and small places where everyone gets in everyone else's business and there's no reason for talking except to answer others' questions and if you start talking to yourself they'd just say you were crazy anyway and it would all be the same thing and I realized that was true in its way but so was the big city - every elevator floor on every stupid landing with people at every doorway watching who you are and what you bring or who and the deft little suggested things they mention in the elevator alone with you - who Mr. Johannsen's been seeing or how 'loud' that Betty Jansley in 224 gets sometimes (the subtext of that being she's a true sexual animal with all sorts of men laying pipe to her doorway 'if you know what I mean') and so just because the subject matter is a little different it's all the same shit - the communal doorway of some crummy walkup smelling of soup and potatoes or incense and peppers and the boots piled up in the alcove belong to no one at all but the garbage bags thrown about never move and Melly Katz in 28 is a nasty bitch Jewess and Murray Sabol on the third floor runs around bare-ass naked all day in his rooms and them O'Bannion brothers keep a filthy place and should be for certain run out - it's everywhere the same but in the small country-places I suppose MAYBE it's easier to just SHOOT someone and put the problem aside but America's always been a place of weak constitution - pun I guess intended - and the bill of rights ain't never been paid and marked 'overdue' it's probably ignored and if you have to do something you first have to grease the palm ('good ole' Americanny cash please') of some or another local magistrate intent on the boozing and with his finger in some dyke some Dutch Boy from Hell bamboozling Mrs. Fedders while her husband's away but the INFERENCE is never the same as the obvious distraction of what's being said - and just down the road is the turkey farm with two thousand white gobblers alive in the yard-pens every year until October comes around and they start taking orders and BOOM BAM just like that by mid-November there's not a fresh one to be found all orders for Thanksgiving having been already filled 'fresh kill is the best kill' the motto being : and the cutest thing around for sure is the babe who tends the turkeys and it's her family farm that's been around for generations and they were the ones who started the entire mess by going commercial and paving some areas for parking and trucks and turning their farm into a death-factory for turkeys and quail and geese and the rest but whatever she's beautiful as she goes about her late September chores looking like some homing angel from Heaven with a gleam in her eyes but she never steps out never gets about and the only boyfriend she ever had is the guy she met at Ag School and he now lives 45 miles away but all that stays in her mind as memory fresh and she scoots off every chance she gets to see him once more and his maroon BMW too is quite often on the scene right there in the yard and it's often been known the things she's done and the bedroom light upstairs comes on at the damnedest times - and right next to it that little bathroom light they keep - and now out front they've put a 'Help Wanted' sign and everyone knows what THAT means Ha Ha Guffaw Guffaw : that's the talk at Busby's when they get the chance to talk and every small-town crime like this is always the same LUST AND ENVY AND SLOTH all being mixed together like some gruel or slop one feeds to livestock and hopes it sticks.

I FIND MYSELF DRIFITNG

227. I FIND MYSELF DRIFTING:

"The wind on my forehead the small breeze on my brow the breath on my face - something I tell you just like that woke me up last night - not once not twice but three different times and I swear I can remember talking back to someone whomever it may have been emanation apparition beats the crap out of me but this motion of air on my forehead somehow felt holy felt reverent or something and inside myself or some part of me INSIDE I realized it was a somewhat privileged situation I was in YET I awoke never really knowing what actually had transpired nor the why nor how and all I'd like to know in essence is WHAT the hell was happening to me what sort of transport am I involved in and where is it to take me ? but there aren't really any answers to any of that just a big elongated silence which I finally find myself slipping into like it was some 'space' for this or that some place of exile some weird retreat and it seems that every Holden Caulfield look-alike poser street-tramp starts at will ranting and raving about 'sincerity' or 'fakery' or whatever and I can't relate I FIND MYSELF DRIFTING and the only cover left to me - far beyond sincerity - is the cover of dream fantasy some faraway island of some new relativity - where the sky is auburn and the stars are dark green and the planets as they whiz by manage to speak words which are really just sounds anyway and the deep dark majesty of outer space meets the direct intensity of inner space and before we ANY OF US know it a whole entire other realm of space is opened up : so anyway does anyone follow me?" - and I looked back to see Malcom Henry Foster sitting alone on the edge of the pier holding a mirror to the sun and I said "Malcolm what the heck are you up to?" and he looked back to me strangely enough and said "I'm trying to cook my supper" just like that - and I was of course confused for nothing was there neither to eat nor to cook and so I simply wondered what was going on and told him so and he answered: "it's me it's all about me I can't go on and I don't want to live so I'm thinking of concentrating reflected light onto my own flesh enough to cook it and consume myself and if we ARE what we eat really enough than shouldn't we just eat ourselves?" and I wanted to call the space police I wanted to hold his head down I thought of a million things but all I could say was "no no don't do any of that at least until you've read Deuteronomy at least until you've visited the Space Needle read all of Moby Dick sent letters to each world leader tried your hand at a new religion ate something different each day and do you know DO YOU that they've unearthed a ten foot wall in Battery Park which is the original battlement of the old settlement fort of Nieuw Amsterdam and they're already wrecking it with backhoes and cranes DO YOU KNOW THAT at least and what do feel about that - the ruination of some heritage the disembowelment of historical evidences the ritual death of the original world by the advanced whoredom of greed and frenzied Jew money and everything that goes with it - and all you can do is sit here farting on about cooking yourself and eating your own sorry fucked-up self TELL ME someone TELL ME what gives ! are you horny are you sex-starved what the fuck goes on?" and I quoted Blake to him 'what is it men in women do require? the lineaments of gratified desire - and what is it women do in men require? the lineaments of gratified desire' which is the least of Blake of course but it's the most satisfying sexual bit I could think of for this fool about to eat himself and it's called 'The Question Answered' as if all mankind had no other questions on their mind but the one about fucking and what it means - a crapshoot of nothing I'd say and this from a guy (Blake) who remained childless and had an idiot wife SO 'go figure' as any other idiot would say and I started to tell him other things but I forget really what they were I dropped names I lit a match I talked about Joe McCarthy and the drunken hearings I even read him passages about torture - so as to help him figure out maybe what it was what twisted and perverse logic it was in the human mind which could allow for the evil enough to harm and hurt other people maliciously : but there were NO answers forthcoming and no other issues either and the entire four-square and solid device of passing time on the way to death meant anything and then right then I remembered one last final quote to throw at him - which I always thought was a cool one and quite correct (by someone named I think DeCherval) 'every book is a suicide postponed'.

THE TESTAMENT OF MARLON HEMMING

226. THE TESTAMENT OF MARLON HEMMING (por abla de dementis morte):

"If a man could walk sideways along the bottom of the sea - scuttling like a crab perhaps - I'd then believe in something greater than what we experience but it is not to be and like the cistern antics of some runaway prophet and a sister of Abraham too there are just too many things to consider before making a decision of some other kind : where to go when the wind is done how to drink the waters which cannot be drunk and where to place fires which will never go out and WE MUST BE SAFEGUARDED too against something : mythology and all the fabric of lies and deceit : for we are but men with cars and houses and useless for anything else as now we have squandered all nature and ruined all the land and cut all the trees and broken vows to relent and we will never again be passive and holy for we are a terror engulfing the face of the world before us and we perform all the dances of death as needed and 'we arise in the mornings and live through our dreads and finish our destructions and return to our beds' and that is the summation of all our calendars and celebrations and wishes and hopes."

THEODORE IS NOT A HOBO

225. THEODORE IS NOT A HOBO:

So why orchestrate the matter ? why try to make sense ? for "Theodore is not a hobo a vagabond or a dirty hitchhiker he is instead a jobless graphic designer who has no work nor prospects because computer skills (which he also doesn't have) have pretty much replaced his version of T-square and art-pen graphic design HE having become OUTMODED and every morning before going job hunting he still bends down over his sleeping wife's head and twirls a piece of her hair around his index finger as he whispers into her ear 'Nan I'm leaving' and she in turn rustles a bit and mutters something and then finds herself wondering if he means for the day or forever and she never knows when she'll come home to nothing to the empty apartment to his absence and the lack of his warmth in the hallway or the muffled sound of TV in the other room or that smell in the place like a person has been there before her" and someone was apparently attempting to describe some domestic scene or something - recounting some story he'd heard or been privy to and as I sat there I found myself too listening to the words flow forth and I realized I too was part of the scene - able to be described as much as anyone else in the telling or the saying for each and every human episode is at base the same - something of emotion and heart or solace or envy any of the hundred things which go into the make of EITHER harmony or conflict and that's the human condition no matter what else anyone tries to tell you and it's all like some old black and white engraving of say Fiorello LaGuardia pugilistically intoning about something in front of some pinball machines painted evil or whatever and he attacks them with a hatchet - making emotion out of some passive rite some mental state of material - all really a NOTHING - but like anyone else he imbues it with something and thereby it lives forever and we still see him whacking the machines over and over a million newsreel minutes of ephemeral time over all these elapsed years the very selfsame things - elm trees across from City Hall a few old boats sagging in the East River harbor and the tired old sullen bell at the Seaman's Church clanging away for something for nothing for some other death PERHAPS at sea - and no one ever knows the difference nor cares yet life goes on in its stagy way and we the AUDIENCE are still trained to clap and applaud at the varied and prescribed times - as we dutifully do en masse for whatever reason it all may be.