Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

204. SOME SHAKESPEAREAN RHYTHM:

Needless to say I’ve hardly ever understood what I’ve seen or witnessed and by the sounds of things that’s a pretty good omen because most of the people I’ve ever watched who were so sure of themselves eventually ended up walking around like zombies glazed and frozen with the contorted expression of a person who really isn’t sure they wish to go on living and that came to mind as I walked along the old apartments in the mid 20’s where every west-side kid seems to be a trouble-maker the ones around the projects anyway over by the old seminary and that wide office building that once housed The New Republic or one of those 1920’s magazines started by Malcolm Cowley or somebody like him - whose name I really can’t remember - and anyway there really was a time when you couldn’t even leave a car in this area for twenty minutes untended before someone somehow would be upon it and the windows would be broken and any contents of value would be gone – it all happened to me once I remember quite well delivering letterheads and envelopes as a printing order 10,000 of each to Air France or one of its subsidiary companies and no sooner had I left the car to make the first of the delivery than the car was set upon and the front vent window broken so a hand could get inside and as I was walking back to get the remainder of the order I realized that all those pieces of paper blowing around the street were my pieces of paper and my envelopes and sure enough it turned out that someone had broken into the car and gone through the material I was delivering perhaps thinking to themselves that it was something more valuable and the boxes they’d taken out of the car for perusal were I guess rejected as nothing special and let to blow all over the streets and that was what I was seeing blowing around so in that case I guess the joke was on me and I should have known better but that was a long time ago and much has changed since then and even then I realized immediately how stupid I’d been not to consider that occurrence so I simply got back in the car and put the little vent window back in place - it having been popped off its little pivot - and started up the car again and went off undeterred and I told the print shop nothing and simply placed another order for 2500 pieces of each as if the customer had simply reordered some more and nothing was ever said as it looked at if they’d signed and received the entire order and that was that but the point I was making was how the streets around there were once the denizen of a lot more dark and dangerous breeds than are being produced now and it does seem a little that people are more milky-white and almost genteel now besides the fact that an amazing changeover in the area has brought in a large influx of very ‘finely’ styled young gay men and women which makes a big difference there and now with many of the new art galleries and such moving in along with the fashion and leisure industries and the restaurant crowd it all seems so very different that even I have trouble now finding or deciding where evil dwells and it is a quite different strata of what passes for society which now runs things - windows filled with graphic displays or entirely artsy and succinct motivations geared towards aesthetics and grace/beauty and the flamboyant leakings of a structure’d sub-group replete with all its own trimmings and YES the streets are bright and happy and the overall feel is at the least lighter and happier but that in itself is not the entire premise for the safer feel for if safety dwells it would seem to dwell – wouldn’t you think? – in a location where men parade with men linking hands and women interlock with others of their same ilk and the narrowing of taste and pleasure and the sensual beauties of the location brought about by this all makes for an if not ‘safer’ than at least more tolerant place in the sense that there is ‘less’ tolerance of the off-kilter the vile or the bad and the evil or at least the kind who once preyed upon ordinary regular people and where it is all these people have gone I’d not know not today or ever for the world is certainly a strange and fumbling place but in it OH! stories abound and I’ve got more than a few to fish out for you and people to go with them so sit back or genuflect whichever as you wish and let me go on as I might ripe and fragrant with my own tales and twisted stories of brokered intrigue and bartered bribes of wish and of deportment : ‘some Shakespearean rhythm of talk led me back to this guy who was sitting down to a small meal alone a salad in a plastic bowl with one or two boiled eggs thrown into it and he was slowly eating his little meal in the open-air beneath a cold sun as no one listened to him but the words off his tongue were pretty great not so much the content but the way they were spoken’ and it was but only for a moment that I heard any of this for it almost inaudible and doubly confusing but another person near me was talking like that and I guessed he was describing the scene before him and as I looked I realized he was talking into a tape recorder of his own and was simply recording vsights and descriptions of what was before him as he sat there ‘and this other fellow comes by with a few flowers for sale and he suddenly kneels down next to the person who is eating the salad and I then see the flowers are dropped to the ground and the two are embracing’ and it was evident as I both listened and watched at one and the same time that what he was describing was actually occurring and I felt myself like at some weird movie with a narration provided by another outside observer or someone else who was viewing the same scenes I was but was adding words for narrative effect and YES it all seemed to work pretty perfectly.