When I am drinking and listening to music as I work on my computer late (for me) at night, I start sending songs to my friends. I hope they don't think they have to listen to them. Sometimes I send a lot of songs. In my frenzied state, I think everything is important. I think what I am sending is profound. Then, in the morning, I look and wonder in horror and shame.
But in the morning, I cut and paste screenshots of news stories that seem hideous or funny to me. I am careful about what I send to whom. Sometimes, I hit the wrong button and off something goes to the wrong person. Q, C.C., and I share a twisted sense of reality, so they get most of my weird ass shit. We are like grown adolescents who have no parental oversight. It is all fun until we get busted.
A story like this can spark my imagination (link), but this morning I refrained from sending anything from or about it. There are perilous divisions here, and though none of us stands inexorably on one side or the other of things. . . well, Q lives in California.
But usually we like to fall into the chiasma of the divisions, a joyous tumble through the gaps in people's assumptions about right and wrong, good and evil, should and shouldn't.
Many of my friends are not as silly and don't enjoy the ride, so I only send them my more reserved arguments. Those are by far the most boring and least honest. I have cleared rooms full of intelligent liberals with my absurdist comments. Often. I didn't mean to. I mean, I thought we were all on the same side. I thought we were all friends. But some people just can't take a joke if it challenges their ideology.
CC, Q, and I are shapeshifters, full of ideologies--plural--that hardly make sense, a hearty blend of Beckett's optimism and Thompson's cruel wit, and maybe de Sade's sense of unusual fun.
I don't think that is an accurate statement, but it was fun to write.
I have another friend, a liberal conservative who's recent views seem to be gleaned from QAnon, who is equally witty but whose quips are mostly above board, things that can be expressed in the larger gathering. He is fun, but I still have to censor myself around him.
I think I learned when I was a kid to open with something shocking. It shifts the ground, shakes things up right off the bat, steals the rhythm and makes people giddy.
I think Trump does this, but not in a witty way. But he is an absurdist for sure.
There. That just came off the top of my head. Now I am going to have another cup of coffee and stroll the grounds, as they say, before I begin another day in the Pandemic Era. I am learning that I can spend my days any way I like as long as I do not go around other people. I am lucky in that.
ReplyDeleteI got two - songs. After I fell asleep. So this morning they were there - nothing to be horrored or shamed from this gift receiver. V. lovely choices. Music gifts are never bad. Even if they are. But mine were definitely not.
Q is writing about being shamed as well. For ZZTop. I dunno. When I was stealing records from my older brothers - I stole their stuff incl. ZZTop - beginning 5th grade if I remember correctly. It was magical in their music room - shit loads of albums - on each side and a massive stereo system in the middle. The bigger the speaker - oh they made investments. Their friends would come over and they'd crank it.
Music was always playing tho - my father's Big Band and Don Ho - my mother's Simon & Garfunkel my brothers Stones, Who, Captain Beefheart, Zappa, Marley, Zep, Yes, Beatles, Uriah Heep, Pink Floyd, Eagles on and on. Me on the piano - practicing poorly.
And then I got a stereo for Christmas. I don't think I left my room much after that. A couple of years later - my own phone WITH my own number. Before driving so -- hours and hours and hours on the phone with the records playing. On my pink shag rug.
My brother gave me my first Blondie, Pretenders and the Cars albums. He also went out on a limb and bought A Flock of Seagulls for me. Then I joined Columbia's Club. Such joy. New albums arriving in the post. And of course hitting the Record Store- Brandon would drive early on - before I got my license. Flipping from A right through Z. Good stuff.
Today is my baby girls birthday. I'm trying to finish up her T.O.C. Box. She has requested an ice-cream cake. So I have to go out in the world beyond Nature and pick that up. And lilacs - I have to pick lilacs for the party table bouquet.
Keepin it simple -
I'm remembering rocking her colicky little tightly wrapped body around the house to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5FCdx7Dn0o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaGUr6wzyT8
A simple OG this morning.
I know how to read a room, and sometimes even with a concoction of various suppressing medications can act upon that. But Soma has never been my gig and so more often than not I go against the grain of wiser heads than mine.
ReplyDeleteI think that is a good combo Beckett, Thompson, and De Sade – I could throw in a few more Marx and Aristotle and all the gloomy modernist Huns like Mann and Hesse. Barbaric Yawps, Howls and Gyres to be sure and definitely an Orwellian urge towards self-destruction and being honest when it is least convenient.
I am too near dead for it to be of value fighting it anymore, and so long as I am kept chained to an iron peg driven into the floor of my office with the doors locked and the widows covered up with black out curtains so no decent citizen can look within, I can be productive
I love the company. I do. And I no longer take pride or shame in my superbly flawed character. It is genetic. Nothing more nothing less. I think you once termed it: “Two idiots screaming fire at each other inside a burning tent” or words to that effect, yada yadda, you know what I mean, if you catch my drift, etc.
I have read among biological scientists that there is a “believer gene” also called an “authoritarian gene.” It is a great survival of the species genetic code for the brain. Basically, those with the gene will believe authorities: parents, tribal leaders, shamans, and even gods. Since human primates have such an extended childhood it makes sense. Someone large and charge tells you: “Don’t go down to the river at night,” it is obeyed without lengthy explanations about crocodiles killing and eating you. If someone large and in charge says: “We always march south when sun is there in sky.” There were no lengthy lectures of the vernal equinox or the movements of herds, you did it because you were told to. People with that gene tended to survive longer than people who didn’t, which is why most human being have the “believer gene.”
Most.
Then there are the freaks, the genetic oddities, the unwashed products of backwoods incest like myself. People I imagine like you and Q. WE were born without that “gene.” It is neither to our credit or to our shame although the world does put in a peck of time inventing reasons for both.
Lenny Bruce said: “Every society needs its deviant.” He was more right about that than when I first heard him and found comfort in those words. Because even though the general survival plan depends upon the “authoritarian gene” the species needs a few deviants to adapt to changing environmental factors. People who are born without the “believer gene” are sort of like the shock troops of a species. “Fuck that crocodile, I wanna go skinny dipping, are the ways by which every once in a while, an enemy is found skulking in the reeds.” Or leaving “before the sun is in that place in the sky” gets a jump on the other tribes hunting the same fields.
Again, it is not a thing to take any pride or shame in anymore than your height, or color of skin, or shape of your noggin. It is what it is.
So yeah, yesterday I got another translating job on top of the other one. This one is due in half a year and involves Norsk. I may be pegged with three or four sets of chains in the interim, but I’ll see you when the Nurse lowers my dosage of Soma and let’s me up to pee.
Catch you on the flip side.