I WAS JUST THERE ON TUESDAY

309. I WAS JUST THERE ON TUESDAY:

I may have taken it all to heart by way too much the way the lemonade frosted the refrigerated glass the way the people were looking in at the Chinese grocer killing a duck and the view from beneath the bridge on East Broadway - the lined up buses to other cities the one-dollar bus to Washington DC the trek to Philadelphia - all of this (beats me!) kept me befuddled and confused as well and I turned to nowhere and saw instead the everywhere of time and place and the old soup kitchen I remembered so well was gone now and in its place two hankering half-boys eating hamburgers and some other westernized piece of toady food all dripping and wet and two drinks on the table they sure were so cute they sure were swell and people in a line waiting for something - more about food and more about where to be than anything else and then I'd lost my wallet I'd lost my place and the old cinder block bar-room I frequented was just then being torn down by a Captain Marvel lookalike just as I blew in and nothing had moved away all the same the very same where the Pilgrims had left their hats the new settlers had simply picked them up and ran : tall buildings finance kingdoms emporiums of doubt and distress the long torrid trail of money the Federal Reserve of the reservation the blooming idiot kids all tattered and torn and then just like that I stopped ! I stopped in at the antiques yard the place where everything salvaged from destroyed buildings was kept and re-sold and displayed and I found wonderful gargoyles and pictures of this and that old bus station counter and signs the ivory-topped coffee table of the centennial Hotel blown through by desert sands and forgotten as well the blinking sign of service and - on the very last shelf I looked - the blind and beautiful picture of you or so I thought a looks-like-someone-I-knew picture of the beautiful girl sitting on a stool and milking what appeared to be a very gentle cow but I left it there it seemed so nice not to disturb what I couldn't understand and the words below : 'Milk us for any information you may need ! boy have we got it in for you' : never could as much as I tried figure out what that meant or from where it may have come and I traveled the land years later still thinking of that little scene.

TOO DAMNED LONG

308. TOO DAMNED LONG:

Not everything that is important can be measured and not everything that can be measured is important Albert Einstein said that and by God if it isn’t true or at least true enough for me to carry it along at least to the degree that I often remember it when presented with some silly fact or statistic about any of a million world-weary causes and prompting efforts at fashioning something either for or against a situation and isn’t that only such an ‘adult’ thing to do having to take sides or force someone to go one way or the other about an issue as if there weren’t anything gray in between or as if no alternatives existed which shaded the issue just a little one way or the other but isn’t it that always what disgruntled cranky adults want ‘certainty’ about everything and ‘don’t disrupt my world it’s running along just fine’ but in whatever case the world is a lonely place and if you’ve got no others around you it can get to feel pretty sad especially if you’re isolated or unpopular in your own beliefs enough as to annoy everyone else and piss others off and then it just becomes the sort of scene where constant carping takes over everything else and no one becomes happy so what then happens ? well they say war or disaster or fire or illness ? or at least I say that and misplaced energy goes into everything else and you wind up with entire energies of industry building rapacious cars and vehicles or countless junk and stupid objects to be consumed and collected and by which to judge others in their having or not having them and in that nervousness you start the endless talk and chatter and gossipy crap that you hear most people on trains and buses and wait-lines going on about like they’ll never ever shut up and it makes for stupid kids on the streets walking around hitting each other and being real loud and being totally without reference to their past or whatever and T. S. Eliot’s Objective Correlative be damned nobody gives a shit about that especially when they don’t know anything else anyway - which is mostly how things are now in a world full of ignorant and stupid scoundrels just going on about themselves - but nobody wants to learn anything anymore for it TAKES TOO DAMN LONG to do so and ‘we want the world and we want it now’ my God how often I’ve heard that crap and the message that comes with it and it’s always the same loud stupid and boorish people doing the same dumb stuff always all the times no matter what (and nothing but worries nothing but worries is the reflex of worrying) and in a way it’s just as important to ‘place’ oneself in the scene of one’s life as it is to live that life for without a knowledge of where you are or to where you’re heading and where from you’ve come then what good is anything else anyway and that is best of all which lends a focus to life and gives a person a particular personality otherwise you’re just a big gray wash of nothingness and anxiety and vagueness so it’s better to be a pointed and hated character than to be bland enough to be loved or liked by everyone and two shades of meaning mean just that - two shades of meaning - so that apparently is what is meant when they say ‘everyone has somewhere to go’ I guess it means that there’s a place for everybody to call home and no matter what else that place is whether it’s decrepit or wealthy it’s at least a place where you can say really say whatever it is what you feel the way things REALLY ARE to you and you can speak your mind and no one’s going to throw you out or take offense and so if that’s my lesson today than there it is and I take it with me even now as I’m walking up the stone steps along the big old New York Public Library building and the two people with the big-ass camera are sitting aside over by themselves carefully scanning the crowd which mingles there in a broad blue sunlight and every once in a while I guess when it seems that someone strikes their fancy the two of them get up and walk over to the person or persons they’ve seen and ask to take a picture NOT JUST any picture but a picture in which the woman - some fancy-assed blond model type with a nice personal bearing and seemingly pretty comfortable with the camera and with beauty too - positions herself next to the one or two people chosen and the fancy-assed camera guy takes a few careful pictures with them and this takes a while because it’s one of those cameras which demand lots of preparation and calculation of light and exposure and f-stop and all that and the woman has yet again to properly situate her striking red scarf and fix her hair and have the guy carefully go over her face and lips and make-up and all so that after a few minutes only then they’re ready to go and in the meantime I’m wondering what the people must think who’ve been asked to be part of this as they simply wait there not knowing what’s coming up or why and I guess they talk about it first for they must have some questions I’d figure about what’s going on and to where the picture’s going and if they too can get one or if they’re being paid for publication or whatever but it never seems to be the way it all just happens and then it’s over and the two photo people go back to their chairs off to the side in the sun and start again to watching all the people go by and the crowd comes and goes getting larger and swifter and smaller and slowing down and two little Asian kids come by with their brother or father or something and he sits down and starts reading a magazine and the two kids wildly take off and start chasing the pigeons every time they land and each landed pigeon is immediately chased back up while the kids scream and make noise and all of a sudden there’s like 30 pigeons all in the air right above our heads and they’re scurrying around and flapping with no place to land because of these kids’ aggressiveness and there’s a big commotion and the kids don’t stop and soon all the fluttering birds are gone just moved away flying into nearby treetops I guess wondering what’s going on but being pigeons before long two by two they’re back on the ground checking things out and it all starts happening again and the father’s oblivious and lost in his magazine and I can see everyone nearby now start getting annoyed at the kids and thankfully eventually someone does say something to the guy and he gets up to round up the kids and off they start walking still making a squeal still causing commotion and isn’t it funny how no kids are annoying if they’re your very own and this was a pretty good example of that I suppose.