The hail-fellow-never-met ethos, the loud, cacophonous, self-dissing ironomachine
More from “The Visionary” a fic(tional)mem(oir) novella languishing ISO customers on Kindle
I left the train last Friday, unable to write, silenced by hopping touchpad cursors. It is just as well. The circuit of the USA by rail and bus drove a stake into the very heart of my blithe dream. The cars have won, just when they ought to have lost. The nation right and left and up and down persists in its love for the sticky stuff, the fracking juice, the car zeitgeist, the hail-fellow-never-met ethos, the loud, cacophonous, self-dissing ironomachine, TV, the faith of our fathers wholly bankrupt, o god our help in ages done. No, I still cannot write. Simplicity may be bliss, but when you say it a thousand different ways it becomes moribund and shallow. It runs against the impermeable wall of our counter-reality. I have run there forever it seems. Witness me in my Plymouth Champ from Mitsubishi in the late 1970s plying secondary roads from the NY border to the shadow of Mt. St. Helens and returning in religious rectitude, wed to the road, to its sensual undulations, to its endless variety within similitude, to its omnipresent generosity. Touching place names, plunging into dirt tracks, encountering visions, accompanied always by my own compositions and playlists keyed to the mood of a wandering 40-something adolescent. Why not celebrate like some WASP Kerouac. A Burroughs who cannot tolerate hard drugs. A Kesey who shuns excitement. A Nicholson who cannot be cruel. A Fonda who slows for trains. What am I doing, saying that henceforth residence should be in car-free neighborhoods? That the key to justice is integrating everything we have euclidian-zoned into one urbanish mix? That scale can save us? That school should be curiosity driven? That education for all ages should be freely available on foot? Who is to say that, in such a world, murder would not peak?
I left the train and felt positively buoyant and took back to my normal life with gusto for exactly two days during which my main computer crashed, my laptop was assaulted by an unknown ailment and I myself became terminally ill to the point of finding myself laying face down on the cold tiles of our bathroom floor wondering how I would get up and, finally pushing up and gaining a back rest on the toilet edge, I let loose and created massive soils which I somehow managed to collect into one dismal package and leave in a heap as I made my way across the floor crawling and managed to push myself up on the bed to lie inert until my sweetheart returned to witness the mess. It was the onset of a a flu that had been going around Manhattan, so they said. Would I want public bathrooms to be the communal norm? Would I want sustainability to make the privacy of this ordeal out of reach for all but those of inherited wealth or clawed pirate booty? Picture cheery attendants receiving equal pay for equal work! Exempting my sweetheart from same. Hmm now. How excretory concessionalism can transmography into a Kohlerquy. It has taken a full week to regain my sea legs and believe buoyancy will dominate this text throughout, beginning now.
We are trying to say this right. From the train window I saw today’s America. It is made up of messy sprawl that makes little effort to disabuse the passer-by. Messy is not the word perhaps. Casually ignored detritus, left where it fell, or gathered into piles like Steve Goodman’s graves of rusted automobiles, mounds of boards and discarded elements of collapsed structures, acres of dirt and dross, signs marking the end of one sprawl area and the start of another. The dominant architecture single-story rectangular storage spaces so nondescript that none could be said to be preferable to another, an unrelenting procession of testimony to an abundance too shabby to warrant even a proper home. There I go again. What good would it do to be salient regarding an American temperament that would permit such a betrayal? What would replace it as a better portion?
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If you find this of interest you may want to check out THE VISIONARY (FicMem Book 3) http://buff.ly/1trvbEt I don’t think anyone has even considered the fact that today’s design of education is inimical to its purposes. And I mean sprawl design.
