Friday, September 14, 2007

PLAY THE MUSIC AS YOU READ THIS

Friday, September Fourteenth, 2007

--Music Plays As You Read--
Find This On Your Player, and play it gently, not so loudly, but there, enough and on a repetitive mode: Beatles: TWO OF US, from LET IT BE. “Sending Post Cards, Writing Letters. On-Our-Way-Back-Home. We’re On Our Way Home. We’re On Our Way Home. We’re…Going…Home…” It’s not in the right order or any thing, doesn’t matter. The important thing is that the melody is playing and you’re hearing it and it’s going on and on and on, like the long and winding road, like, in the song, the possible line about being longer than the road that stretches out ahead. And while that’s going on, you read this:

READ: There’s an old joke, goes something like this:

Q: What’s the last thing that goes through a Co-Dependant’s Mind When They Die?
A: Another Person’s Life Flashes In Their Mind.

And that is much of life, when viewed circumspect some times. You go through the motions, you show up. Woody Allen, much maligned in some areas, he got it right when he said words to the effect: "80% of life is showing up, being somewhere". To which I add, and being there on time, but none the less, it’s like watching it from afar. You sort of just feel once removed from the events as they occur from time to time. Emotionally you’re sort of detached: Especially so at an awards presentation last night for work. And, on your mind right now, there’s a funeral of a co-worker’s mother, you sort of just-now-don’t want to go to; which is on for 3 o’clock this afternoon. You want to stay home and mope. You wish the weather would be better, cooler, more “mild”; definitely not as hot. You KNOW you won’t go and eat a meal with any one after. No drinks. F-that. You had just two last night and nothing really good to eat at all and that was pisser number one. Real pisser, couldn’t eat well, didn’t. Couldn’t find some place to eat or get some meal that would have been good for you at all. It sucked. And so did your mood. The mind/soul of it, dropped right out of it all, every-thing. You began, started thinking about mortality and how fucked every thing was. About how you’re not appreciated more for who you are and all. That mainly, you’re not "more". But how could you be looked at as "more", if you’re not? You’re just this thing and that’s all there is to it. There’s nothing here. You have a gift but you somehow are unable to do more with it. It sucks.

Two Of Us...that Beatles tune...and I think: Just the two of us…and then, yeah, that song plays: “Just the two of us, we can make it if we try, just the two of us.” Add or turn on that song, by Bill Withers. Withers, indeed. Time withers. Life, withers; by and by. Building castles in the sky. Something about good things coming to those who wait but not for those who wait too late, and going for something, whatever it is, that we know…What do we know though? What do we know? Two things. Two People. A Twin Dilemma. The Twin Dilemma, the title of a Doctor Who episode. One with Tom Baker. Something to do with twins. My sister and I. If you believe or understand Philip K. Dick or schizophrenia. Or bi-polar disorders.
Bill Withers is still alive according to Wikipedia. He wrote: Aint No Sunshine as well as Lean On Me…Well, we wake up, you know? We have ‘another day to run’ and even though you may feel that, it’s right to say ‘I don’t want you on my mind’, as I feel from time to time about the people and things I know, I know that I should ‘take it all in and check it all out’, and funny thing is, these quoted items, are the tracks of the retired artist who used to make toilets for Boeing 747’s in Los Angeles, all the while writing songs, and making it! Making it. Hmmm. Interesting. His wife handles the business now, doing all the "whatever it is", of a retired person’s stuff, who can collect residuals and all, based on previous work. You know, he’s got stuff out there. People do re-recordings, versions of your work, you get money off of that. Important, right? Something, yes? Whatever, okay? Whatever. Impact forever.
That’s what that’s about. Impact. Some kind of impression. They’re still going on and on about me. Through the miracle of life or will. My will being done, long after I am. Like Walt Disney, like many a musician.

And, uhhh…being on time? Early. Well. I’m not at chapel nor am I going to that grave site. I think I made it. After going through door after door after door. Plenty of maps all along the way but Ladies that do that (Give the: "Here's How You Get There," spiel.) they’re way in the BACK: There's remodeling going on at Rose Hills now, but even still; how come it’s so complicated? Nice green grass. HOT place, huh, on the hills. Rose Hills Cemetary/Mortuary, Whittier, California, in the sunshine. Smoggy, not a cloud in the skies. Beyond hills, small mountains, East of Downtown L.A. proper. Whittier. Good thing my windows roll down (they’re electric). I’m parked with all 4 open, under a tree, in the shade and should move up as the sun will be hitting my back pretty soon.
I’ve had some water, and it has taken 40 minutes to get and figure this place out if even this is right. I’ve still my doubts. 3.17 pm and no one’s here. Busy cars going up down the main thoroughfare. This “last resting place”, for many thousands of people who get buried in Los Angeles. Spooky-Sad here. Traffic Report: SB 605, the San Gabriel River Freeway south of 5 or Golden State Freeway, there wasn’t much traffic. Speed Limit a faded chipped old yellow 30 MPH on the tar-macadam, which the worker’s trucks driving on the road keep it well past 35, 40+ at least. Yeah, I guess so. Why not? Outrun Death? I almost got run over twice. Once coming up, a semi-truck moving over into my lane on the freeway. Then, as a car came around the corner fast while I was on foot, attempting to cross the street after negotiating the maze that was the labyrinthine circuitry of the reception area at Rose Hills Mortuary/Cemetery, in Whittier, California.
I wonder do I have the right place? Wouldn’t there be other people here? Besides just a few of the workers cuttin’ the grass up the hill: Gnangggg-Gnangggg-Gnangggg whipping cord-Edge-Trimmers cutting grass off the grave markers and such. Always cutting grass around here. When does it ever cool off?
Going (went) through Rio Honda, Santa Fe Springs, Downey, Norwalk, etc. to get here. Rio (River) Honda (?) over the Freeway, and San Gabriel River west of here in “Whittier” where Nixon went to college. (It’s down the 605 (S) a ways from here.) On the Hills of the Cemetery. My friend Jim Douglas’s Grandmother (Joan?) is buried around here somewhere as I recall. Been here once before. For that I believe. And on the other side or just before turning off to go down this road to this place down from Gate 5: (I turned in at Gate 1.), there’s a “rental” place I came to for Grip-It Lighting once, a long time ago. It’s now a Caterpillar (Rent) place. Goofy. Creepy. Strange. It was supposed to be at 3 PM and there was a note in parenthesis: (Arrive Early). No one is here but me.

{And as I write this now at 7.48PM, probably could have just gone into the “chapel” on the hill and just sat and waited, looking at the pageantry and all: ALL of the other services, funerals, people being buried, adulated, revered, etc., and saw all the people before and then after and then caught the folks and maybe 6 PM would have been the Interment Service at plot #1283 or whatever the place was curbside.}

Do I dare “intrude” on the chapel up the hill? I want to pee again and eat, have a beer and get a massage. But I haven’t any money now. Polished off the ice/ice-water from a coffee this morning before a large turkey sandwich & muenster cheese sandwich, the only thing I’ve had after a smoothie after smoothie after smoothie and Tension Tamer Herbal Tea. And another Tension Tamer Tea, one by itself, not in the juice. And, after the ice/water, I had a 0.5 oz bottle of water or some such measured thing as that, just sitting here, thinking a bit...
The Smoothie: had grapefruit juice, packets of c-vitamin etc powder mixes, 3 peaches, one pear, 2 bananas, some (15) pellets of green algae, 30 drops of grapefruit seed extract. And for most of the day I’ve had to sit down and contract my bowels for gaseous expelleramous, that and passing liquid through my bladder, and still now I feel a bit dehydrated. A little bit listless and slightly headachy. I took a bowel stiffening (I thought.) Tylenol pain reliever before sleep at midnight, when I finally got in bed and all.
All this after leaving the “Mousecars”. The oscar plus Awards for workers recognition show at work last night. Being herded into the north hall side of Banquet Room of the Grand Ball Room of the DL Hotel left me hivvy. I revolted. Cut against the tide and walked back through Down Town Disney shopping district between the two amusement parks where I work, to the shuttle stop east of both places of which only one I work in, and took the shuttle back to my parked there at 5 AM car, baking leather seats in the relentless California sun. Drove myself home alone.
I’m staying here till 4 PM (I eventually left at 4.30 PM.) and then I’m going home. I put in my time and I’m tired. Drove by several plots on my own past several groups: one black, one hispanic and a couple of mourners here/there, mostly asian, revisiting long-dead relatives.
Go up to the church, you ninny! Yeah, I will, before I go home. 2 small long back wing birds on a pine tree nearby. Way off in the distance I spotted some crows. (Later, on the hill near the chapel, looking off in the distance to the west towards downtown L.A., several big-big winged birds were visible in the sky hovering on the thermals above the Rose Hills plots.)
The trees are mostly pine scattered around here. (Nothing indigenous.) Palms along the main road. Olives here there. Elm? And a few others I don’t recognize. I’m a failure when it comes to this phenomena. I’m a failure in general, I guess. It’s all right. At least I’m the best one I know. So, that’s a pretty good thing, I’d say. Pretty good. Pretty darn good.
Wish I had the line on the nearest Velvet Turtle (Long defunct old high-end you go there after church place. Or big business farts go there for 2 martini lunches M-F.) or some such, I could get into—drink iced tea with no fruit—no lemon or lime in it at all. Maybe that’s what did it for me. My tummy today. Mojito last night. But uhh more likely the cheese chicken sauce that’s hot (red) and guacamole with tomatoes and onions! That I had smeared on it. Yum-yum! Tasted real good, but oh-oh-oh UGH my tummy later on!!
I picture dead dead flesh. Old brown skin dried off bones here, cemetery, hair, stink, mortuary END—NOT coming back to life. Body badly decomposed. SAD in a way. What would happen if/when my Mother or Gary (her husband), didn’t make it home alive from one of their “trips”? DAD died in Mexico, when Alice (his wife), was up in the States. What? SAD.
I guess I must just go home now. (4.25/4.30) I messed up. Went to the wrong gravesite or time’s off/wrong—won’t be until 6PM—I don’t want to be there for the viewing. Someone I don’t even know, never knew, went solely for? We go for ourselves don’t we? No? We’re lucky? We aren’t dead? Family Friends Help support. Ease Burden of Sorrow/Loss by showing up, being there. Lean on me.

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