Then & Now
So I was reading my friends email and I came across these here...One is from September 6th, 2001...the next from September 25th. It stands as it stands.
_______________
September 6th 2002
And it sure as hell ain't me. Silly of us to blame it on the moon, but it was aught one, dammit, we were supposed to be dandy.
And a g'mornin to you, from down here in the backwater community of New York, New York, a city on the grow, to be sure, but still a long way off the mark...see, what happened is this...they thought vertical equated civilized. Boy are their faces pink with fury, doughy with fat, red with rouge. The new proposed filliment won't be ready until round about '15, what with the tungent shortage. Looks like the kids are going to have to go without their cylinder records for a decade or so. Still and all there's work (as always) to be done on the farm, and the milk maids (blonde to a tee) look grand on the stools, working the teets, directing the not warm (how not warm?) flow of milk into the steaming buckets. I'd pay a penny or more for the pound, you know, and I sure as hell ain't talking about the milk. That I can get for free from the old, old, old manor house up on the hill, sittin' there all pretty like, but the ol gal who runs it, see, shes a brunette, and no one ever did tell her that she can't pull off the ribbons, the bows, the pink trains following her around. Its almost like she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. That being the case there's not much else to fit in there, you know, and it kind of cuts an odd angle to the words that come from her mouth. or, at the very least, the way her words are chosen. I myself am academia bound, though it shall be slow going. Got my own milk maid in tow, as you know, and there is oft times some bucking and pulling at the reigns. Not with the teeth, thank god, cause that would cost a fortune in orthadonturey, not to mention the trip down to the city and what that would (and has) cost us (all). S'all right, though, for there are diamonds in the mine and one finds a way to fill the words with words and the space with nothing at all, which do indeed preserve the essence of the space, despite the breeze or the occasional burst of butane from ones posterior (crowded library be damned- it is too early for decorum and if any of these here folks were worth their weight in salt they'd be out in the fields where the corn waves and the berries are unplucked, growing rot heavy and waiting to touch down.) Your letter was recieved, by the by, and couldn't have looked nicer in the mail. Get your pony hitched up at Staples, where they do indeed sell the replacement parts you're looking fer. I have very little to worry about as it is about turning time, and you well know what sort of effect this has on the strength of my character. It offers it one, to be sure, and god never hears dead men, though one could be lead to believe that it is they who paint the leaves in an refracted effort of repentence. They do looked gorged and full of sin as any many down at the saloon, after all, and their ready and gaudy flavor does little for the harvest.
The moon was large as it was strong the other night, friend, and I had no trouble finding my way home.
love, always,
Ra-ta-tooie
And it sure as hell ain't me. Silly of us to blame it on the moon, but it was aught one, dammit, we were supposed to be dandy.
And a g'mornin to you, from down here in the backwater community of New York, New York, a city on the grow, to be sure, but still a long way off the mark...see, what happened is this...they thought vertical equated civilized. Boy are their faces pink with fury, doughy with fat, red with rouge. The new proposed filliment won't be ready until round about '15, what with the tungent shortage. Looks like the kids are going to have to go without their cylinder records for a decade or so. Still and all there's work (as always) to be done on the farm, and the milk maids (blonde to a tee) look grand on the stools, working the teets, directing the not warm (how not warm?) flow of milk into the steaming buckets. I'd pay a penny or more for the pound, you know, and I sure as hell ain't talking about the milk. That I can get for free from the old, old, old manor house up on the hill, sittin' there all pretty like, but the ol gal who runs it, see, shes a brunette, and no one ever did tell her that she can't pull off the ribbons, the bows, the pink trains following her around. Its almost like she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. That being the case there's not much else to fit in there, you know, and it kind of cuts an odd angle to the words that come from her mouth. or, at the very least, the way her words are chosen. I myself am academia bound, though it shall be slow going. Got my own milk maid in tow, as you know, and there is oft times some bucking and pulling at the reigns. Not with the teeth, thank god, cause that would cost a fortune in orthadonturey, not to mention the trip down to the city and what that would (and has) cost us (all). S'all right, though, for there are diamonds in the mine and one finds a way to fill the words with words and the space with nothing at all, which do indeed preserve the essence of the space, despite the breeze or the occasional burst of butane from ones posterior (crowded library be damned- it is too early for decorum and if any of these here folks were worth their weight in salt they'd be out in the fields where the corn waves and the berries are unplucked, growing rot heavy and waiting to touch down.) Your letter was recieved, by the by, and couldn't have looked nicer in the mail. Get your pony hitched up at Staples, where they do indeed sell the replacement parts you're looking fer. I have very little to worry about as it is about turning time, and you well know what sort of effect this has on the strength of my character. It offers it one, to be sure, and god never hears dead men, though one could be lead to believe that it is they who paint the leaves in an refracted effort of repentence. They do looked gorged and full of sin as any many down at the saloon, after all, and their ready and gaudy flavor does little for the harvest.
The moon was large as it was strong the other night, friend, and I had no trouble finding my way home.
love, always,
Ra-ta-tooie
________________
September 25th, 2001
Back to the black, once again. Or at the very least the dawn-ee gray. First day back to class today, don't you know, and lord knows it couldn't seem more- eh, lets just say unnesseccary- if it tried. There is only gray and the mood- my mood, rather- is defunct. I tells ya, I was well and truly on my way to wanting to do well and progressing towards the inevitable, and then along comes life to once again remind me why I repudiated in the first place. Not that there's anything to suggest that my desire to excell was anything more than a first week of class impetus, don't you know, but I think I have too much little else to do that it may have carried me through the finer stages, cooler months, to the point that the only way I could have failed was to run off to madagascar to wed. On a whim, you know, and now there is the rain and the somewhat overworn path to the video store and the all but sheetless bed, which comes off as all too white in the wee small hours of the morning. Jason, I tells ya, we've never needed a bit of the old wool sweater more. Little pure and driven fallen from the sky. Some new tour de force coming up at yez from Port Chester New York...
Nah, to tell you the truth even that dream has been trumped up and sullied one too many times. There is a part for us all in it, to be sure. Alissa would look clean and smooth on the pages of a magazine, and she did do your first proffesional interview after all, yet there is no force, no flight, no fury of the wrist from yours truly and I, at least, was the one I always put my money on. Well, incedentally, anyway, for I was mighty with the conjure and cool in demeanor. Now I am tired and waiting for one of many from a various type of fatality. There may be life left in the bones and some of the cooling, wet warm seeded earth in the tips, but that more than ever before is it. If ever in all my wanton wanderings, in my highest climbs, in my most green and black of black&green, there was a place for us- the collective us, though specifically so- it seems to have dissolved in some sort of fleshy, denuded world of posts- post irony, post modern modern, post decay, all that fun stuff. Picked up a nice bright red hardcover copy of "On Moral Fiction" recently and I have to admit even I have trouble making sense of just what in gods name he's talking about. Could have been the weather, could have been the hang over ringing loud at the base of the skull, could have been the fact that the city seemed streaked with sweat and other worse, more perverse sufferings. Yet I was on the subway, where I have done some of my best reading (a place that I do miss after all, though disjointed from time- just the process, you understand, and not the relavent, cadent, restless faces from those moments, those days, long lost and pounded{expounded} out through the skin, drawn tight and mediocre through the failing sieve of the liver, and on and on [I was home the other night and rifling through the old and sacred. found a whole stack of envelopes- dated oct 5, oct 9, oct 13, oct 20, oct 29, nov 4, nov 8, nov 12, all with scribbles upon them, all with more clever names in the return address than I could ever hope to conjure these days. It is a time I do not often recall, simply because I know that what caused it, what spurred it on, what made it come about does still exist and waits warmly below the surface for a five hour drive from buffalo or a nice pool-like stroll back to the brewery; yet when presented with such a remembrance I can only think, out loud and down low, hell, boys, we wuz young. We had nonny and the laundr-o-mat and lucy in the sky and edwards to de-rail and bacon to cook up fat and the moon, oh dear god the moon, she were not incedental, she were not a slivering fawn- she were there, on the ocean shining down on everything...and we, the both of us, did wait so long, years of our lives wasted, afraid.] where, indeed, are the days of the infra/structure. Seems like if we had had just one more year of that, one more month unsullied, one less heavy winter, that there would have been a mighty door not only found but thrust open
and kept ajar, letting the cool god damn breeze rush in with all the feeling of promise and not just this, no, but also its fulfillment, and not just this, no, but its guarantee of another promise, and its forthcoming fullfillment. An endless sea of faces that were just those, but rare birds, too, and cut in angles that seemed to have some sort of gargantuan weight, some pressure beyond our ability to define, yet we would try and the process would never become tired and the faces would never cease their angular imperative and the words, lord alive, the words, between those spines, mine or anyone elses, would move and flow and evoke grander times but no longer lost times just other times which may have been worth writing about, boys, but lord, here we are at the tavern reading them and writing some more. Stroking out those lines on the white and the primed, and I don't just always mean the canvas bare, if'n you catch my drift, and there would damn well be bottles of white wine chilling in the stream, whether the fish were biting or not, and there would be wisdom a'plenty but not too much of it and none of it too damaging. There would be ever the sun on the hair and the dissolving of the dress, though it never be removed, and the names of the giants would be etched in the tombstone and Dylan? Man, he made sense to us, buddy, he gave us a million roads to walk or crawl or trot down, regardless of the wind that were a blowin- be it idiot or otherwise- and god knows there were more albums to bye (and there, of course, still are} To say nothing of the cloth, of fabric itself, of the way it might drape or fold or hide [however slimly] the wrist, or the thumb, or the neck, slender o',and running its course beneath the wool, to its inevitable sheen, shine, blaring body ready to intake that first harsh deep breath when submerged in the icy water of some stream, some falls, some misused words once upon a midnight gamble . There were walls to stain with glass and cars to stain with golden showers, and god damn it people didn't grow bloated or sick, there was nothing but the ruddy red in the cheeks, the real naked glow, that first naked glow, when one glances over and one is in shock that one has a naked one beside one, round, curving, sloping, moving in and out, whatever the morning may or may not bring. There are parks of verdent greens and tracks still to be left in the snow, after all, and the whole wide clam is still waiting to be pried open, whatever the size (and distance from the hole) of the pearl.
Perhaps it is too much to expect that there be no notion of the abnormal, my young (stil young indeed) friend. Yet there is no miser in me yet, and though quieted some, I can still hear the roar with the best of them. Even if one cup of coffee does send me to the shit tank.
Where I am off to right now, confusion somewhat fought back with the burning torch for the moment. Once the day a'side does re-emerge, perhaps the flames will falter. For right now, though, dear Benny Brecht, things can still seem aces. Cheerio and all that rot...
Love,
Sen. Tinker Highgate,
lost in the wallow
_______________
September 6th 2002
And it sure as hell ain't me. Silly of us to blame it on the moon, but it was aught one, dammit, we were supposed to be dandy.
And a g'mornin to you, from down here in the backwater community of New York, New York, a city on the grow, to be sure, but still a long way off the mark...see, what happened is this...they thought vertical equated civilized. Boy are their faces pink with fury, doughy with fat, red with rouge. The new proposed filliment won't be ready until round about '15, what with the tungent shortage. Looks like the kids are going to have to go without their cylinder records for a decade or so. Still and all there's work (as always) to be done on the farm, and the milk maids (blonde to a tee) look grand on the stools, working the teets, directing the not warm (how not warm?) flow of milk into the steaming buckets. I'd pay a penny or more for the pound, you know, and I sure as hell ain't talking about the milk. That I can get for free from the old, old, old manor house up on the hill, sittin' there all pretty like, but the ol gal who runs it, see, shes a brunette, and no one ever did tell her that she can't pull off the ribbons, the bows, the pink trains following her around. Its almost like she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. That being the case there's not much else to fit in there, you know, and it kind of cuts an odd angle to the words that come from her mouth. or, at the very least, the way her words are chosen. I myself am academia bound, though it shall be slow going. Got my own milk maid in tow, as you know, and there is oft times some bucking and pulling at the reigns. Not with the teeth, thank god, cause that would cost a fortune in orthadonturey, not to mention the trip down to the city and what that would (and has) cost us (all). S'all right, though, for there are diamonds in the mine and one finds a way to fill the words with words and the space with nothing at all, which do indeed preserve the essence of the space, despite the breeze or the occasional burst of butane from ones posterior (crowded library be damned- it is too early for decorum and if any of these here folks were worth their weight in salt they'd be out in the fields where the corn waves and the berries are unplucked, growing rot heavy and waiting to touch down.) Your letter was recieved, by the by, and couldn't have looked nicer in the mail. Get your pony hitched up at Staples, where they do indeed sell the replacement parts you're looking fer. I have very little to worry about as it is about turning time, and you well know what sort of effect this has on the strength of my character. It offers it one, to be sure, and god never hears dead men, though one could be lead to believe that it is they who paint the leaves in an refracted effort of repentence. They do looked gorged and full of sin as any many down at the saloon, after all, and their ready and gaudy flavor does little for the harvest.
The moon was large as it was strong the other night, friend, and I had no trouble finding my way home.
love, always,
Ra-ta-tooie
And it sure as hell ain't me. Silly of us to blame it on the moon, but it was aught one, dammit, we were supposed to be dandy.
And a g'mornin to you, from down here in the backwater community of New York, New York, a city on the grow, to be sure, but still a long way off the mark...see, what happened is this...they thought vertical equated civilized. Boy are their faces pink with fury, doughy with fat, red with rouge. The new proposed filliment won't be ready until round about '15, what with the tungent shortage. Looks like the kids are going to have to go without their cylinder records for a decade or so. Still and all there's work (as always) to be done on the farm, and the milk maids (blonde to a tee) look grand on the stools, working the teets, directing the not warm (how not warm?) flow of milk into the steaming buckets. I'd pay a penny or more for the pound, you know, and I sure as hell ain't talking about the milk. That I can get for free from the old, old, old manor house up on the hill, sittin' there all pretty like, but the ol gal who runs it, see, shes a brunette, and no one ever did tell her that she can't pull off the ribbons, the bows, the pink trains following her around. Its almost like she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. That being the case there's not much else to fit in there, you know, and it kind of cuts an odd angle to the words that come from her mouth. or, at the very least, the way her words are chosen. I myself am academia bound, though it shall be slow going. Got my own milk maid in tow, as you know, and there is oft times some bucking and pulling at the reigns. Not with the teeth, thank god, cause that would cost a fortune in orthadonturey, not to mention the trip down to the city and what that would (and has) cost us (all). S'all right, though, for there are diamonds in the mine and one finds a way to fill the words with words and the space with nothing at all, which do indeed preserve the essence of the space, despite the breeze or the occasional burst of butane from ones posterior (crowded library be damned- it is too early for decorum and if any of these here folks were worth their weight in salt they'd be out in the fields where the corn waves and the berries are unplucked, growing rot heavy and waiting to touch down.) Your letter was recieved, by the by, and couldn't have looked nicer in the mail. Get your pony hitched up at Staples, where they do indeed sell the replacement parts you're looking fer. I have very little to worry about as it is about turning time, and you well know what sort of effect this has on the strength of my character. It offers it one, to be sure, and god never hears dead men, though one could be lead to believe that it is they who paint the leaves in an refracted effort of repentence. They do looked gorged and full of sin as any many down at the saloon, after all, and their ready and gaudy flavor does little for the harvest.
The moon was large as it was strong the other night, friend, and I had no trouble finding my way home.
love, always,
Ra-ta-tooie
________________
September 25th, 2001
Back to the black, once again. Or at the very least the dawn-ee gray. First day back to class today, don't you know, and lord knows it couldn't seem more- eh, lets just say unnesseccary- if it tried. There is only gray and the mood- my mood, rather- is defunct. I tells ya, I was well and truly on my way to wanting to do well and progressing towards the inevitable, and then along comes life to once again remind me why I repudiated in the first place. Not that there's anything to suggest that my desire to excell was anything more than a first week of class impetus, don't you know, but I think I have too much little else to do that it may have carried me through the finer stages, cooler months, to the point that the only way I could have failed was to run off to madagascar to wed. On a whim, you know, and now there is the rain and the somewhat overworn path to the video store and the all but sheetless bed, which comes off as all too white in the wee small hours of the morning. Jason, I tells ya, we've never needed a bit of the old wool sweater more. Little pure and driven fallen from the sky. Some new tour de force coming up at yez from Port Chester New York...
Nah, to tell you the truth even that dream has been trumped up and sullied one too many times. There is a part for us all in it, to be sure. Alissa would look clean and smooth on the pages of a magazine, and she did do your first proffesional interview after all, yet there is no force, no flight, no fury of the wrist from yours truly and I, at least, was the one I always put my money on. Well, incedentally, anyway, for I was mighty with the conjure and cool in demeanor. Now I am tired and waiting for one of many from a various type of fatality. There may be life left in the bones and some of the cooling, wet warm seeded earth in the tips, but that more than ever before is it. If ever in all my wanton wanderings, in my highest climbs, in my most green and black of black&green, there was a place for us- the collective us, though specifically so- it seems to have dissolved in some sort of fleshy, denuded world of posts- post irony, post modern modern, post decay, all that fun stuff. Picked up a nice bright red hardcover copy of "On Moral Fiction" recently and I have to admit even I have trouble making sense of just what in gods name he's talking about. Could have been the weather, could have been the hang over ringing loud at the base of the skull, could have been the fact that the city seemed streaked with sweat and other worse, more perverse sufferings. Yet I was on the subway, where I have done some of my best reading (a place that I do miss after all, though disjointed from time- just the process, you understand, and not the relavent, cadent, restless faces from those moments, those days, long lost and pounded{expounded} out through the skin, drawn tight and mediocre through the failing sieve of the liver, and on and on [I was home the other night and rifling through the old and sacred. found a whole stack of envelopes- dated oct 5, oct 9, oct 13, oct 20, oct 29, nov 4, nov 8, nov 12, all with scribbles upon them, all with more clever names in the return address than I could ever hope to conjure these days. It is a time I do not often recall, simply because I know that what caused it, what spurred it on, what made it come about does still exist and waits warmly below the surface for a five hour drive from buffalo or a nice pool-like stroll back to the brewery; yet when presented with such a remembrance I can only think, out loud and down low, hell, boys, we wuz young. We had nonny and the laundr-o-mat and lucy in the sky and edwards to de-rail and bacon to cook up fat and the moon, oh dear god the moon, she were not incedental, she were not a slivering fawn- she were there, on the ocean shining down on everything...and we, the both of us, did wait so long, years of our lives wasted, afraid.] where, indeed, are the days of the infra/structure. Seems like if we had had just one more year of that, one more month unsullied, one less heavy winter, that there would have been a mighty door not only found but thrust open
and kept ajar, letting the cool god damn breeze rush in with all the feeling of promise and not just this, no, but also its fulfillment, and not just this, no, but its guarantee of another promise, and its forthcoming fullfillment. An endless sea of faces that were just those, but rare birds, too, and cut in angles that seemed to have some sort of gargantuan weight, some pressure beyond our ability to define, yet we would try and the process would never become tired and the faces would never cease their angular imperative and the words, lord alive, the words, between those spines, mine or anyone elses, would move and flow and evoke grander times but no longer lost times just other times which may have been worth writing about, boys, but lord, here we are at the tavern reading them and writing some more. Stroking out those lines on the white and the primed, and I don't just always mean the canvas bare, if'n you catch my drift, and there would damn well be bottles of white wine chilling in the stream, whether the fish were biting or not, and there would be wisdom a'plenty but not too much of it and none of it too damaging. There would be ever the sun on the hair and the dissolving of the dress, though it never be removed, and the names of the giants would be etched in the tombstone and Dylan? Man, he made sense to us, buddy, he gave us a million roads to walk or crawl or trot down, regardless of the wind that were a blowin- be it idiot or otherwise- and god knows there were more albums to bye (and there, of course, still are} To say nothing of the cloth, of fabric itself, of the way it might drape or fold or hide [however slimly] the wrist, or the thumb, or the neck, slender o',and running its course beneath the wool, to its inevitable sheen, shine, blaring body ready to intake that first harsh deep breath when submerged in the icy water of some stream, some falls, some misused words once upon a midnight gamble . There were walls to stain with glass and cars to stain with golden showers, and god damn it people didn't grow bloated or sick, there was nothing but the ruddy red in the cheeks, the real naked glow, that first naked glow, when one glances over and one is in shock that one has a naked one beside one, round, curving, sloping, moving in and out, whatever the morning may or may not bring. There are parks of verdent greens and tracks still to be left in the snow, after all, and the whole wide clam is still waiting to be pried open, whatever the size (and distance from the hole) of the pearl.
Perhaps it is too much to expect that there be no notion of the abnormal, my young (stil young indeed) friend. Yet there is no miser in me yet, and though quieted some, I can still hear the roar with the best of them. Even if one cup of coffee does send me to the shit tank.
Where I am off to right now, confusion somewhat fought back with the burning torch for the moment. Once the day a'side does re-emerge, perhaps the flames will falter. For right now, though, dear Benny Brecht, things can still seem aces. Cheerio and all that rot...
Love,
Sen. Tinker Highgate,
lost in the wallow