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Taking Out The Trash before/after Stephen Crane didn't always write about tuberculosis. I didn't like Stephen Crane, much like I didn't like many of the writers that was forced upon me by teachers, their heavy weight of the traditional veiw of literature has oppressed me for years. But in that vein, I will write to take my mind off of things, rather than to write of things of the day, or emote. A pale notion in this still heady, 'express what you feel' time of history. Anyway. I absorb a lot of useless information, as does anyone at any given time. I also tend to talk with people, regardless how impotent or aimless their conversation may be. Its a cheap form of love we all should share without guilt or sense of haughtiness. I really don't like the word 'haughty', but it fits. I also don't like the words ointment, moist, or salve, but there they are. At any rate, oftentimes I will engage in banal, trite, cliche' or otherwise useless conversation with whomever seems to drift into my path, my bubble of awareness. And by engage, I simply mean listen. And listen I do. Things get caught in the web of my memory. Worthless things. Psychic trash. Like sitting in chemistry class, and having a dull upperclassman go on-and-on-and-on about nothing, only to catch myself agreeing to statements like, "You know, I don't know WHY they don't disband all the nba teams, put all the great players on one team, and have them tour the country as 'the NBA's best'." This bit of flotsam has rattled around for YEARS, much to my chagrin. It lurks, and at inappropriate times, swirls around and clogs the creative pipe flow. I think the guy who said it was a decent, if not somewhat awkward and mawkish person, and you have no idea how much I wish I had never met him. And I agreed to the statement, at first, anyway. When I snapped back to awareness, and started expressing my veiws, disagreeing with the guy, well, that was the end of that conversation. I learned a valuable lesson that day. Maybe two. Along with the flotsam and jetsam is my map reading skills. I am geographically inclined. I KNOW where things ARE. But sometimes, I get shown a map of a certain region, specifically one with oceans, and if the oceans aren't blue, sometimes I see the map in reverse, as if the oceans were the important feature, and the land was irrelevant instead of the other way around, and I have not one clue as to what the hell I am looking at. I saw the words 'building contractor' the other day and I wondered, "Who in their right mind wants their building contracted? If you're building a home, don't you want it as large as it can possibly be?" On the first day of second grade, I was wearing a brand new pair of blue jeans. I always got new jeans for school, lucky, lucky me. This year, I was sent to school with the admonishment from my mother, "And don't rip holes in the knees of your jeans, like you always do." I scoffed, which was a big word for something a seven year old would do, and wondered if she thought I did it deliberately. I went to parochial school, as I said in times past. We started the school year with chapel services. Chapel. Chapel is a nice word. I started to run on the cement sidewalk, for no particular reason as children do, outside the edifice. And you can guess what happened. The girl's name I liked that year was Rhonda. And the old guy I talked to on the beach has a daughter in california, used to live in Colorado, and regrets not buying beachfront property. A homeless guy I talked to when my brother graduated college called me Willis. He called everyone 'willis'. He picked up cans at the university for a living, trading them in for a deposit. He said he did well, paid for his rent for him and his 'woman'. I just had doubts that the 'can-man' got got laid at all. The other 'can-man's' name was ernie. I was there when his bike got trashed. He left it near a fence at a party where a band was playing, a band that later broke nationally, I think. To get in the restricted party, kids started jumping the fence and landing on his bike. I was high on acid, pot, and whiskey at the time. "Don't do that," I said, "Ernie's gonna' get PISSED." I think I may have said it somewhat cartoonishly, as it only seemed to encourage more violence. One guy in particular stopped. "He's gonna' get pissed, huh?" "Yep," I said, with pupils as big as a snow owl's, reeling, hanging on to the fence for stability with a strange feeling that the world may suddenly invert, and everyone would fall into the sky, but knowing on some level that this was ludicrous bordering on insane, but NOT BEING ABLE TO LET GO OF THE GODDAM FENCE, "He's gonna' get pissed." To which he and several other guys responded by kick-stomping the shit out of the bicycle. They left, and I raved after them in a strained voice, "That's it! He's gonna' get PISSED!" Later on, people were crowd surfing by jumping off of the deck into the crowd. High out of my mind, I stood above the howling crowd as they beckoned me to jump. It being LSD, I really didn't want to touch anyone, and I especially didn't like the way they got flung to the ground at the back of the crowd. I stood there for awhile, then got down. I was just way too high for that nonesense. The guy who works at the local dump's name is Bill. His son flunked out of college, then went to another, and is married now. Bill served in the Korean War, and never remembers me. In a side note, during a pretty bad storm, my mother took some bags of trash to the dump, and the dump man bragged about where he took refuge from the storm: in the 'transfer case'. Basically, where everyone dumps their trash, after it gets compacted, then stored for awhile. Big things get sent right into the transfer case without compaction. Bill said it was allright. There was a couch and footstool there. He laid down amongst the filth on a couch during the storm. I suspect he's waited for an excuse to do this for years. And then, maybe so have I. Filth, flotsam and jetsam, ugh!
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