Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

95. THE BLUE GARDEN:

The Blue Garden was like a complete paradise to me - a place wherein everything was shown to be in its perfect light and dimension and I grew to love it although I found after a long period that it was not really a place in the terms I thought it was and that it spliced and displaced the reality which it presented through its lens as if some strange projection of movie film or show was at work - in addition the deeper the interest and the involvement of me the viewer became the more dense became the fabric of what I viewed and even though (as I said) the perfection of everything was paramount and obvious with the Blue Garden it did take on shades and differences of meaning (mostly having to do with time) which acted primarily as the filter of trueness and factuality - everything else tilted towards myth and falsehood.

94. WHEN I GOT SICK IN THAT OTHER LIFE:
After that I got pretty sick again for a while and at least for two weeks struggled around with a fever and blisters on my lips and face and I tried simply to lay low - staying days on end in the basement spot I'd taken below the Studio School mansion just reading books and reading some more and never really moving except to get something now and then to eat or drink and I didn't much even walk around which was a real switch for me - but time it passed and I recovered and getting my sails back was like being Christopher Columbus having everything and ready and steady and all good to go I wanted to rule the world and when first I poked my head back out it was March and I felt like the groundhog too late for its own party and said instead 'to Hell with Winter this is the Now!' and I ducked back in and got to work and if a groundhog could duck I guess I did that too and all down along Eighth Street it seemed like nothing had changed and really it was only a few days no matter that the French and German kids next door were still piddling around in their leather walk pants and breezy cool French fabrics and they wore hiking boots as rugged as an Alps hill-top and I wanted to walk right over to them and just say 'Hi! I lived and I've made it through and here I am again out the other end' but I didn't know how to say it right in any other language and it even sounded too weird in this one so instead I decided I just wanted to kiss that French girl in a most happy way and lo though she glanced and smiled I didn't and international relations as it were be damned forever and those Youth Hostel kids I must now forget  -  it was so long ago  -  and there are times when young that a person fears the old fears to be amidst those past the age one experiences for oneself but now I can see it all so differently for they have somewhere somehow aged along with me as well and it's really all the same in the end and I hope they're still alive somewhere and if some few of them are not then bless them by their God as well and if they all are still among the living perhaps then we shall all roll out together.

93. TED'S PERFECT HEALTH:

And sometimes he'd seem as drunk and stupid as a fish but he never really was - it was all play acting - he'd go along testing everyone just to see what he could get away with and I suppose to see where it would lead him too and he had this silly tophat he'd wear and some greatcoat in the winter made out of some horrible Yugoslavian fabric and it was as thick as a cask and heavy to boot and he'd wear it everywhere no matter and the cigarettes he smoked would curl the air around him and he'd leave everyone else choking but no effect was seen on him and his hair had turned a wild gray seeming always ready to just go off in every direction and he was loud and boisterous and just never shut up and he'd have people call him Ted - the ones he really didn't know - he'd just say 'hi my name is Ted' and that was that they'd believe him and take him at his word and no one knew the difference (because remember to him his ABSENCE was essential) and it just always worked - he'd bark orders out and people would listen he'd call down from upstairs just to say 'I'm coming down and if anyone asks just tell them 'it's Ted' and leave it at that' and then he'd come slamming in as noisily as possible and slap down his arm on the counter and say 'who's what and where?' as his opener and he'd just start eating - see he'd order ahead and it was always ready when he got there - and it seemed he never paid and he wanted it that way although he really did pay on a tab they kept open for him and he'd have people thinking his 'Greatness' was what got him free food and all that crap you think about when you consider a liar weaving his stories BUT it was always right and ready for him NO FAILURE no loss - he'd go about telling people to 'EAT! have some food! by God a Hungry man is an ANGRY man!' like that was some sort of biblical affirmation he'd gleaned through some intense reading : in his own way the man was a menace (as I saw him) a menace to any real thought and intelligence but he'd always be ready to spout nonetheless and then to have people - even myself - listening wide-eyed and gaping to whatever was coming next and I thought to myself often things like 'if this man had a gun and it was about to go off he'd be sure enough and able to convince people first to legalize the possession of that gun and its bullets and its firing right into their faces' and I never for a moment doubted that for NO MATTER WHAT nothing ever went wrong for this guy - he had the looks the mouth the brawn and the brain and everything was chiseled perfectly for good health and long life HE HAD IT MADE was what it seemed and - any lackluster performance ignored - there just was never a failure if he was involved : which brings me back again to those horrid paintings or whatever he'd made and hung and showed and as I've said already they were mostly God-awful but he could talk accentuate pump and cajole until even they were considered as some outlandish Picasso late-development and worth every penny of a few thousand measly dollars (guess who collected art guess who bought the crap guess who touted it all as 'arriving greatness on a ship-load of folly' ? why none other than that same Dennis Hopper himself and if you don't believe me go ahead someday and look up the Dennis Hopper Collection on some art-site somewhere GO AHEAD I dare you!).

92. AN IDEA OF KERTUT:

There once was an old Indonesian guy who lived by himself as a sort of Holy-man amidst his garden and meditation and he once drew me a picture on the ground with a stick and the picture was an androgynous human figure standing upright with hands clasped in prayer but this figure had four legs and no head and where the head should have been there was only a wild forest of ferns and flowers and there was a small smiling face drawn over the heart and I asked him what was that which he had drawn and he said 'to find balance this is what you must become - you must keep your feet grounded so firmly on the earth that it's like you have four legs instead of two - you see THAT way you can stay in the world - BUT you must stop looking at the world through your head and you must look through your heart instead - that way you will know God' and now in fact as I think back I also recall that at another time he'd sent me a note which simply said : 'Remain Invisible' and after I'd thought about all that for a while I realized it's often as difficult not to do damage as it is to do damage - when you're doing something and when you intend not to it sometimes just makes no difference and I found that surely PERCEPTION changes and things alter their appearances and simply SEEM different but it's all interpretation and you have to just move your ind along as things come and go and you've got to use the LIFE in the living as an interpretative gesture by which to qualify whatever you see : that's why artists are so great and that's why I spared no effects to make myself be possessed of that artistic view - the detachment and the dedication and work that go with it - as I went along and USUALLY that means a freedom from lots of things - no attitudes no opinions or judgemental ideas no awareness of the time and place as limiting factors but instead a complete breach of the mental geography which makes prisons out of time and place and thus resultant is the looseness and the wide-open-to-experience approach which brings magical surprise which brings a serendipity of creativity to everything SO I read a few books and I moved along I drew a few pictures and I kept going so I wrote a few things and I meandered on and everything was experience and everything was internalized and I began to laugh just laugh at everything limiting for it meant nothing to me and that's really really the way things should always be.

91. MOTHERS AND FATHERS ON THE MARGINS OF DREAD:

Sometimes I just said to myself 'what is it you are doing?' or I looked deep into some mirror somewhere just to see what I really looked like and if it was me but all that was long ago and now I'm old enough not to care and never look and even that old soft and smooth face itself has turned perhaps harsh and old and coarser and wrinkled but who knows - I don't and I never try - as I co-exist now amidst everything else anywhere and there are myriads of faces and forms and types and qualities everywhere around me now from which I partake of them all - not kindred but merely there : bathing beauties and ribald queenies fat and robust brings with spirit and dark wiry doubters too girls with hair under their arms and smooth girls all perfect and shorn and made-up girls and plain girls and coiffed and dressed girls or the sluggos in khaki and camouflage - I've seen them all and everyday too - outside of the Strand looking like thugs or looking like dancers and it's never really mattered to me and it's the same with guys too - disheveled or broken violent or coarse they all look like something else something other than what they are and without any lineage except the modern day and between them and all that I see there's nothing left to do or say and now they all hang around Union Square without a care in the world and once right where there used to be ideology cause faction and venom now there's nothing but stylists and posers and people hawking vegetables and bread - the usual allotment of idiotic causes and trends and it just all makes me sick to heart to see the play-gyms for kids armed to the teeth with mothers and fathers on the margins of dread and with a certain vague pulchritude of the moment which makes them alike to all the rest - it's a sad and sorry spectacle which is supposed to comfort and maybe to some it does but I see it really as the END to meaning but life goes on and long-time-no-see it's all done without me.