Search This Blog

Monday, January 20, 2014

hot and cold

Nice glaciers Beagles. I love them. Maybe we can send Al Gore over to inspect them.
Well I never, Gage Park, Gage Park high school, too avant garde for Beagles. I went to my yearbook and there were two poems, and one of them was a bit of a downer, oh and neither of them rhymed. Well that rhyming, I am not that big a fan, sometimes it seems moronic to me:

Ta da da da, da da da, da, dum de dum, Moon.
Buh buh buh buh, de de de de, ram a dam June.

Know what I mean
Jelly bean.

Now there is a rhyming couplet that never gets old.

Seems to me that you might be a haiku kind of man. There is a form that has strict rules, and an austere viewpoint, and there is something cold about it too, the kind of thing you would write on a lonely mountain top during a snowstorm, and never on the beach.

So amid the petty hurly burly of high school, the dumb clubs, the rallies, the soul-deadening blather of the teachers, your mind was already on Alaska, the eagles cawing, the fish rustling down the icy mountain streams.

Well what was it about Alaska, back then? The isolation, the high ratio of natural to manmade, the cold? I wonder about the cold. There is something about it, even here downtown stepping out of the door to the horns of traffic and the piles of dirty slush, there is something bracing about that cold wind slapping me in the face. But I’ll be getting tired of that in a couple weeks, and there will still be months of winter to go.

You know there has become a sissification of the American people about cold, you know all those showbiz types living in LA, and probably all those weather girls go down there to be discovered and when they aren’t, they come back here to give the weather, and their thin limbs tremble at the sight of that big white mass over Canada, heading right to the windy city, which is not even that warm before the winds arrive. There is just something square about cold, the galoshes, the hats with the ear flaps, dragging that dented shovel behind you, when what you ought to be doing is lounging on the beach with your buff bronze body, sipping on a mojito or a Bud Lite Strawberita, like all the hip kids.

Not many people in Alaska mostly because it is so cold, but then so is the desert, why didn’t you want to live in the desert? Maybe because nature is kind of feeble in the desert? Maybe because in Alaska you always have to be doing something, chopping wood and hunting animals mostly it seems, while in the desert the only activity seems to be crawling along in a ragged t shirt looking for water, seems more boring than chopping and hunting.


I think the official theory is that the youth culture began maybe in the middle fifties when you had all these baby boomers sprouting up, and you had tv just coming up with its commercials, and admen realized that they could sell these kids stuff, and before that if you were a kid you were just waiting to become an adult, but now with the admen wooing us, we began to see ourselves as something important, and then the music. Seems like before us kids just listened to their parents’ music, but now we were listening to our own music, and making a lot of it too.

At first I think the admen were kind of running the thing with their manufactured teen idols and all, but later, when we became older there were drugs and the unpopular war, and the admen lost control of us, and that’s when we had all that cool sixties stuff. Eventually the admen caught on and recaptured all that, but that was later.

But back before the sixties, everything was still controlled by the admen, everybody had to watch Ed Sullivan, everybody had to want a new car, everybody had to believe this was the greatest country ever, and was getting better every day. And the thing was you had to believe that, if you didn’t there was something wrong with you, and indeed you were making trouble by thinking things that didn’t need any thinking about, because everybody already knew what was the right thing to think. I guess that was the part that bugged me, not so much that everybody believed the same thing, but they wanted you to too. A little exaggerated, but that’s how I remember it.


Here’s another story to go along with that commie factory story. I remember hearing on NPR a playwright from some occupied country after the fall of communism, and he was sort of complaining. During occupation all you had to write was some subtle attack on communism, and all your countrymen thought you were telling the real truth and being brave. But once communism fell, you had to think of something new to write. And nobody knew what to think because previously they had been told what to think, and they hated that, so they all got together hating communism, but once they had toppled that statue of Stalin in the town square, what would they be thinking about? And what would they do? They used to complain about all the potholes that the commies let accumulate in the street, but now they would have to fill them in, which was a lot more work than complaining.

No comments:

Post a Comment