Saturday, December 31, 2011
Saturday, December 17, 2011
Alienation Network
I think I got a digitized 'you was eye-balling alert' on facebook. Actually, it was, "Boy, you been sending freind requests to people you don't know." So much for the Will Rogers/Dale Carnegie thing. I'm regressing. Invertebrate.
While I'm cooling off under the half ton of granite, there will be the self-appaisal and self-bashing, the kind of both that are exhillarating on days you don't get hit with the great acre-wide fly swatter in the sky. Electric reproach. People I never met feel I have intruded on the their climate controlled Christmas. Like I was playing jump rope in their walk-in closet.
Sending the request is like the Manson Family creepy crawling in people's delux ranch house with security system and professional support system all switched to pick up body heat and call the cops.
If it isn't some evil Freudian analyst getting the goods on you and making you a slave to your own admissions of inadequacy, it's Facebook, Google and all the tech companies you depend on to socialize, now that people are allergic to strangers. The alert I got sounded like someone ratted me out for sending them a friend request, when Facebook streams names and faces of supposed mutual friends. Granted, it's titled 'People you may know,' but it's also one in an infinity of corporate Rollodexes wired with alarms and traps. It's a Montessori school caged in razor wire.
This should be where crone maturity helps, and it does. A little. And then it comes back to hurt again. I was made to see the old crones who have to sell insurance or what ever till they croak, eating all the rejection and taking affirmations in having learned to take it as part of a job, and not an indication of personal scabies. All the while, the individual looks old, seedy and frozen in a tundra of lost essence. All things are essence. Such as the feeling of being a poisoned rat. I feel vitiated. Like I'm exiled to a store front office where people reject my sales pitch. While trying to be social and happy.
While I'm cooling off under the half ton of granite, there will be the self-appaisal and self-bashing, the kind of both that are exhillarating on days you don't get hit with the great acre-wide fly swatter in the sky. Electric reproach. People I never met feel I have intruded on the their climate controlled Christmas. Like I was playing jump rope in their walk-in closet.
Sending the request is like the Manson Family creepy crawling in people's delux ranch house with security system and professional support system all switched to pick up body heat and call the cops.
If it isn't some evil Freudian analyst getting the goods on you and making you a slave to your own admissions of inadequacy, it's Facebook, Google and all the tech companies you depend on to socialize, now that people are allergic to strangers. The alert I got sounded like someone ratted me out for sending them a friend request, when Facebook streams names and faces of supposed mutual friends. Granted, it's titled 'People you may know,' but it's also one in an infinity of corporate Rollodexes wired with alarms and traps. It's a Montessori school caged in razor wire.
This should be where crone maturity helps, and it does. A little. And then it comes back to hurt again. I was made to see the old crones who have to sell insurance or what ever till they croak, eating all the rejection and taking affirmations in having learned to take it as part of a job, and not an indication of personal scabies. All the while, the individual looks old, seedy and frozen in a tundra of lost essence. All things are essence. Such as the feeling of being a poisoned rat. I feel vitiated. Like I'm exiled to a store front office where people reject my sales pitch. While trying to be social and happy.
Saturday, December 10, 2011
Being Nowhere
Hole. Sphyncter. Rictus. Pick any word, dear readers, there is a town named Albion, Pennsylvania, and per act of dark sentiment, an idyl, I once drove onto that burg's main street in the hatchback. This town looks innocent, store fronts, all six of them, painted fresh and white as the Klan.
There's a branch office of the First National Bank, so puny and frail, like it had little to lose. There were scatterings of farm and cottages, last time I looked, also cows and horses a quarter mile from a park in the center of town, and there was a six story commercial building that used to be a bank and now processes billions of welfare claims.
But that can be written off as a by-product of social progress, like bologna or liverworst. There are about six streets in Albion wide enough to let three horse-drawn buggies block traffic on. That's a total of 666. Well, no. I added incorrectly. Still 666 popped up on my inner adding machine. I fudged the numbers. But it's still an indication that Satan may pop up in smoke.
It's a frightening and legendary number. I get this shit from my crystal ball. There's evil in this green United States town called Albion. Nothing to be concerned about. An ordinary mark of the beast. Like certain cows. Certain oxen, too.
Oxen have power. Drinking establishments have power, too. There are cerain rocks and heaps that exude fragrant unique charisma.
I went into a bar and got a beer.I remember all too much, but that was the last thing that made sense for the next few minutes. Then trancendental heightened resolution.
Glancing back at a small and cheery bucolic outlay of small town personage there, I couldn't claim total inner unity with this cornpone. Hush my mouth. There was an unused coin operated pool table in the back of the corner bar. Having zero entre with the Appalacians, slingshots in the back pockets of bib over-alls, I decided to play a rack of pool, kill the beer, and leave before I'm made to feel less like a resident of Albion, Pennsylvania.
I put a quarter in the stainless steel slot and pushed in the metal sliding quarter snatch, eager to ease the nerves with gentle sport. The mechanism jammed.
I heard the balls, all mocking sixteen of them, dislodge from their pool ball residence inside the table. And they stopped, neglecting, as normal, to roll and clatter into the rear portal, like the pool table's wide wooden asshole. Indulge the histrionics. I'm fast. The balls failed to reach their destination, and I was unable to play pool.
Notice a stranger in a jerkwater town. Self-consciousness. Something the romantics rant about. "What are the customs here?" I asked myself, as told to do by my great big social science prof at college. I did poorly there. No good answer was arrived at.
At last moved to action, I walked to the bar and waited for the wan, drawn bar maid. She drifted my way, and I said, as carefully as possible, "I put a quarter in the pool table, and the balls are stuck inside the machine....."
I use the elipsis because, in soft nasal twang, she stopped me from explaining further. "You gotta kick it," she said, free of guile. College boy on this side of the bar, I gleaned, verbatim, I should walk back to the pool table and kick it.
This made sense. A blow to the table could dislodge the balls. If I kick the table, the pool balls will be jarred into cooperation and come rumbling home to papa. Note the point of origin at which views less explored come out to play in the rural sunshine. And in a honky tonk.
I kicked the table lightly, once, just to get a sense of how the tootsie might adjust to getting slammed into hard wood. Mr. Foot said back, "Don't get carried away, Hoss." I kicked the table three or four more times, but the balls stayed stuck. And because of nervousness, I may have seemed clumsy. I'm not.
Next try I kicked the table in a different location on it's dysfunctiional green felt form. I didn't notice just then that I was drawing attention. Just as I kicked from yet another position, this time winding up, I was paralyzed with the report of loud inquisition.
With a bass southern drawl, a tall hay seed hollered, "WHAT IS THAT ASSHOLE DOING?"
While still paralyzed, the girl-wheat-shaft behind the bar said, in her plaintive voice "The pool balls is stuck. He's kicking it." Then came, instantly, the idyl flash of comprehension. Animosity flutters off.
The rubes now knew why I was kicking the pool table. They misundertood, at first, my behavior, because they kick things all the time, and it never looks as dippy as my little performance. There people are called, "shit kickers." Now their emotions changed from fear to enlightening. "Kick it, kick it," they chanted, in a warm, spontaneous and unassuming fervor. Set free from paralysis by the outpouring, I gave the table a more socially acceptable style of kick. It was sort of like a drop kick. But with added finesse, for the on-lookers. It was like I was responsible for their fragile sense of closure. The balls cut free and rolled, sonorously, to the table's buttocks. There was cheering.
It took my usual of about nine minutes to shoot fifteen balls into holes in the sides and corners. On the way out, the fast nod to the town folk was practiced from years dealing with this type of social immediacy. I'm glad to have shared the confusion and pleasure. Any kind of realization might be a good one. I hope that room full of hicks remembers the experience with the same kind of love as do I. The family of man is a trip.
There's a branch office of the First National Bank, so puny and frail, like it had little to lose. There were scatterings of farm and cottages, last time I looked, also cows and horses a quarter mile from a park in the center of town, and there was a six story commercial building that used to be a bank and now processes billions of welfare claims.
But that can be written off as a by-product of social progress, like bologna or liverworst. There are about six streets in Albion wide enough to let three horse-drawn buggies block traffic on. That's a total of 666. Well, no. I added incorrectly. Still 666 popped up on my inner adding machine. I fudged the numbers. But it's still an indication that Satan may pop up in smoke.
It's a frightening and legendary number. I get this shit from my crystal ball. There's evil in this green United States town called Albion. Nothing to be concerned about. An ordinary mark of the beast. Like certain cows. Certain oxen, too.
Oxen have power. Drinking establishments have power, too. There are cerain rocks and heaps that exude fragrant unique charisma.
I went into a bar and got a beer.I remember all too much, but that was the last thing that made sense for the next few minutes. Then trancendental heightened resolution.
Glancing back at a small and cheery bucolic outlay of small town personage there, I couldn't claim total inner unity with this cornpone. Hush my mouth. There was an unused coin operated pool table in the back of the corner bar. Having zero entre with the Appalacians, slingshots in the back pockets of bib over-alls, I decided to play a rack of pool, kill the beer, and leave before I'm made to feel less like a resident of Albion, Pennsylvania.
I put a quarter in the stainless steel slot and pushed in the metal sliding quarter snatch, eager to ease the nerves with gentle sport. The mechanism jammed.
I heard the balls, all mocking sixteen of them, dislodge from their pool ball residence inside the table. And they stopped, neglecting, as normal, to roll and clatter into the rear portal, like the pool table's wide wooden asshole. Indulge the histrionics. I'm fast. The balls failed to reach their destination, and I was unable to play pool.
Notice a stranger in a jerkwater town. Self-consciousness. Something the romantics rant about. "What are the customs here?" I asked myself, as told to do by my great big social science prof at college. I did poorly there. No good answer was arrived at.
At last moved to action, I walked to the bar and waited for the wan, drawn bar maid. She drifted my way, and I said, as carefully as possible, "I put a quarter in the pool table, and the balls are stuck inside the machine....."
I use the elipsis because, in soft nasal twang, she stopped me from explaining further. "You gotta kick it," she said, free of guile. College boy on this side of the bar, I gleaned, verbatim, I should walk back to the pool table and kick it.
This made sense. A blow to the table could dislodge the balls. If I kick the table, the pool balls will be jarred into cooperation and come rumbling home to papa. Note the point of origin at which views less explored come out to play in the rural sunshine. And in a honky tonk.
I kicked the table lightly, once, just to get a sense of how the tootsie might adjust to getting slammed into hard wood. Mr. Foot said back, "Don't get carried away, Hoss." I kicked the table three or four more times, but the balls stayed stuck. And because of nervousness, I may have seemed clumsy. I'm not.
Next try I kicked the table in a different location on it's dysfunctiional green felt form. I didn't notice just then that I was drawing attention. Just as I kicked from yet another position, this time winding up, I was paralyzed with the report of loud inquisition.
With a bass southern drawl, a tall hay seed hollered, "WHAT IS THAT ASSHOLE DOING?"
While still paralyzed, the girl-wheat-shaft behind the bar said, in her plaintive voice "The pool balls is stuck. He's kicking it." Then came, instantly, the idyl flash of comprehension. Animosity flutters off.
The rubes now knew why I was kicking the pool table. They misundertood, at first, my behavior, because they kick things all the time, and it never looks as dippy as my little performance. There people are called, "shit kickers." Now their emotions changed from fear to enlightening. "Kick it, kick it," they chanted, in a warm, spontaneous and unassuming fervor. Set free from paralysis by the outpouring, I gave the table a more socially acceptable style of kick. It was sort of like a drop kick. But with added finesse, for the on-lookers. It was like I was responsible for their fragile sense of closure. The balls cut free and rolled, sonorously, to the table's buttocks. There was cheering.
It took my usual of about nine minutes to shoot fifteen balls into holes in the sides and corners. On the way out, the fast nod to the town folk was practiced from years dealing with this type of social immediacy. I'm glad to have shared the confusion and pleasure. Any kind of realization might be a good one. I hope that room full of hicks remembers the experience with the same kind of love as do I. The family of man is a trip.
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