Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

16. I HAVE SEEN IDIOCY AND ITS NAME IS.....
(A visit to Easton PA)

There had to be something in the hands of the storefront clown that I couldn't see - for it was producing balloons seemingly from nowhere and the passing little kids were both overjoyed and intriqued but to me the clown looked evil as all get-out and a poor substitute and besides, for the end of another morning, the mothers looked bedraggled (even the guy next me, he leaned over and boozily muttered 'look at these women, they all look like whores'). The men all looked too skinny, like farmers just in town for a visit, and the parmesan cheese guy outside the dirty little pizza joint looked downright sinful, dirty and spent. Two blocks away was the Easton Bus Depot, where 'DelVal Transit' kept dropping buses marked with local streets and towns and malls - buses which dropped a few more lost souls into town and just as quickly took five more away. The dark-haired girl, whom I actually did see and watch as she eventually walked over to this clown scene, had gotten off the bus with two small carry-on type bags and she was on her cell phone the whole time - talking in some beautifully inflected Russian-accent - with her 'boss', evidently back in New York City, who had (from what I gathered) sent her out to Easton to meet someone else who was to take her to some party or seasonal-convention or something, where other girls were eventually to meet her also, and they were to 'work' the event. No one had showed up yet to pick her up, nor were there any other girls there to meet her. So, watching the stupid clown and listening at the same time, I decided - for fun, OK - to conclude my scenario with the idea that she was a whore in town for that event, sent there by her pimp or whatever they're called, back in the big city, to work the gents at the event, make as much money as possible, stay a day or two, and return by the end of the weekend (or whatever) with a bundle of cash, of which she'd get, perhaps, 30 percent. I wanted to nudge the guy who'd just commented to me about the women present, but his taste in locals had already precluded from me any idea of his being interested in outsourced sexual-labor - that being, for him, too far advanced a level of economics and business theory. On the other hand, what it said for the big honcho back in NYC went unanswered : were things that bad now in Manhattan that he had to send his finest, imported Russian talent, like some caviar-tray, out to the dry barriers of one derelict and wheezing Easton, Pennsylvania? Was there no 'tradition and individual talent' (to quote T. S. Eliot) in eastern Pennsylvania to overcome the dearth of local opportunity? Could not the beautiful, young beauty serving bagels, eggs muffins and coffee in the right-here-nearby-at-the-corner coffee palace do just as well (believe me, could so). Was there not nearby an entire mountainside habitated by Lafayette College beauties willing to make a few extra dollars by simply walking down the hill and doing some piecework?

The answer to all of those questions would be - 'of course, of course'. But this was another place - this was a distant field of opportunity bisected by morals and homilies about the correct life and the hundred little German churches surrounding the local hillsides for miles around - Moravian cemetaries replete with people so stiff they had to be buried standing up, local mothers still in their curdled bonnets and hats pledging to continue churning whatever it is they churn in the afterlife - rules, procedures, laws, regulations. This was the place where no foul politician or salesman or lawman dare show his face. This was endless row after row of broken storefronts, emptied and derelict buildings, ghosts of old hotels, long-gone divestitures of purpose and meaning leaving behind only the re-used and re-used again skeletons of old buildings with no longer any purpose for their own standing. This was an emptied and saddened town-center ringed by highways with malls and clumps of stores sending errand-bound locals on their crazed and enticing ways towards Hells of their own making.

In this center of the little city, (an Easton Fire Department Captain's car rushes by, followed by two enormous firetrucks of same, sirens blasting, lights blazing; traffic - or what there is of it - somehow manages to spin to a halt), the tiny clumps of people I see are made up of, I realize, only the lonely few who've been left behind - the car-less, the barely shoe'd, those with nowhere to go and little money to take them there. All of that accounts for the deportment they carry with them - a slow, bedraggled, tempestuous, snide, shady yet subdued haze bespeaking nothing more than suspicion and a certain hunger. The clown, I decided, just perfectly represents them. The few children staring back, and myself watching mysterious balloons appear from nowhere, are realizing - in some bedraggled and winsome way - a future that actually very few will EVER experience. A future within a maze. An ending in a story with no way out.

I was, at moment too, overhearing the Spanish spoken by another couple nearby. He spoke swiftly, while she nodded, in words I really couldn't understand but which, at first, I did not realize was Spanish. I really thought he'd just said "I guess tell your horse it's Gina."

15. CHANTS OF A LIFETIME (Explained):

The story just posted on the other blog (the one called 'I really want to get this going') - go ahead open it click on it try and read if you can - is all true. It's about an old man at an apple orchard - one who sits atop a hillside next to the ancient crumbling American farmhouse in which he yet lives somehow, tended to by one or two of his daughter's - who may or may not be with families of their own too, I don't know. He sits there watching the people come and go and the occasional traffic go by on the road below - and if you do go up to speak with him he is, sometimes, lucid enough to start going on a blue-streak about this or that. The trouble is one is never quite sure what's he's really saying or to what the references are nor if there is or ever was a thought or a conversational word which started the speaking. So, it's a difficult engagement and one the daughters get a little awkward about - defensive or humorous or even embarrased. No matter. I wrote it and posted it because I actually did think it was a winning portrait of an internalized and fractioned landscape of mentality which has wonders of its very own - like fountains which run backwards or perhaps clouds which are born on the groound and then rise like so much fog from the mysterious mists of another time and place.

We are ALL saddled with something, and whatever it is that we shoulder around, well - we should at least be able to describe it and talk about it.

14. THE BREAKING LIGHTS OF KILGARRY CENTER ON THE EDGE OF FAIRFIELD PORTER FIELD:

Have you ever walked out onto a stage with all the lights on and the audience at the ready and the stage directions marked with tape and everything set to go and what you THOUGHT was a script turned out to be nothing more than a newspaper article about rodents and survival in underground tunnels and the only thing you saw when you looked out at the audience were some flashlights or illumines shining back towards you and you couldn't for the life of you figure out WHY or WHAT they were but you surmised that behind each flashlight was some form of a human (you hoped anyway) head with some ideas of meaning and expectation - and whatever it was they were expecting to see you knew damn well that YOU weren't about to be the one to deliver it?

Have you ever taken the moment extra - when you have it - to dwell on the idea of experience and what you're supposed to learn from it - as if every bit of living was some lesson you were supposed to absorb and be able to pass on to others? Whew, I guess I did.

Like just today - between watching portraits of crass politicians talking back to reporters about torture and youth and the places they play and talking-head types playing fuzzy-ball tennis with their lackluster mouths and the scansion of their hands held open with the broken piano-keys of an abbreviated concert career - I swore I heard someone talking about a person who had 'choked to death on a Lifesaver.' And, of course, being the sort of person I am, that phrase in and of itself so paradoxical led me immediately into a long rant about the philosophical quandaries presented and the depths of the paradox itself and the story line in general dwelt upon the differential of the dichotomy between life and death amidst the pomp and circumstance of 'choking to DEATH on a Lifesaver' : and then I noticed HOLY SHIT! the audience out in front of me was laughing uproariously and I could do nothing to stop it from doing so and the flashing lights had all disappeared (even though they were NOT flashing they were called 'flashlights' so they must have, at some level, possessed the quality of a flash for someone so what the hell...) and I figured MAYBE just maybe if I keep talking and scouring the ceiling with one-liners and double-entendres I could maybe stop a war this war that war or any other war of my choosing - even though there wasn't a war really and it was all just a pretension to keep a cover while people randomly died or died by choice (another strange paradox I suppose) and anyway what really mattered was that the patterned element of behavior be kept in check and local - so that NO new weirdnesses were allowed to break out and alter the argument - and then someone really DID ask me what sort of math courses I had back in seminary school and I answered as to how they didn't really offer any they didn't do much about math and they asked WHY NOT? and I said 'well they were too busy trying to convince us that three was really one OR they were probably afraid that some jerk like me would go up to the board and turn to the class with the problem and ask : 'Now! how many times does 1 priest go into 5 young boys?' - and, oh yeah, the audience is STILL laughing on that one.

Yes, there are some things that keep one from practicing : I can remember my very own times staring out windows and hating the next half-hour of time supposedly piano time practice time silent I hated but went on nonetheless and up above my head was a green skylight along the atrium where this piano was  -  a seminary practice room a corridor an alley way  -  and the heat would build up as magnified some by the lass of the skylight and in that still room I could sweat an I swore I could watch the varnish of shellac (realizing I didn't even know the difference anyway) almost bubble up in the heat on the practiced wood of the piano top and then later in the cold when it dried it dried in little patterns like bricks both hard and bumpy and I liked that for the texture it made the texture gave the music something and they each somehow reflected each other and yeah yeah as a twelve or thirteen year old those sorts of things were important to me  -  the odd and the oblique  -  bu o one seemed to care and I never spoke of this stuff with anyone at all : knowing my world was sorry and instant and quiet and still while all the rest made their noises.