I just heard a teevee talking head refer to himself as a member of the “You” generation. Whaaa! I never heard that term used ever before. How dumb am I?
Then I heard a teevee evangelist-soothsayer saying that World War III started when the Hezbollah (Lebanon) attacked Israel recently. I didn’t know the Hezbollah attacked Israel recently; I thought it was the other way around. Jesus, how dumb am I?
Then, coincidentally…
But I have to stop right there and explain how when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is start reading. I’m reading at the moment 13 books including three books on Charles Ives, Hilda Doolittle’s little book on Freud, The Poetry of Stephen Crane, Henry Miller’s Nexus for the second time in my life, a book of Virgil Thomson’s old NY Herald Tribune music critic columns, O’Neill’s Days Without End … and, oh yeah, Freud’s Character and Culture. I’m always reading Freud.
I love to read. For some reason, I find it much more stimulating and inciting than anything visual I’ve ever seen unless it's an extremely beautiful woman. I know, I know, reading is visual, but not like I’m talking about…and yeah I know I’m not talking I'm writing. If I’d a had a daughter, I might have named her Semantica.
Reading calms me down. That’s why the first thing I do in the morning after I become cognizant that I am awake and pound my skull to shake my brain awake is read. If you wake up around 5 here in NYC, daylight is awakening with you in your windows, but there is still the leftover stillness of the passing darkness, up until around 6 when the city’s perpetual hum starts creeping back into your awareness. This city is always humming--or roaring, depending on your sensitivities and your definition of them. I can imagine that to a blind person, NYC’s perpetual hum is a roar as they sense it happening through the sound waves their sightless body senses since the major part of the perpetual hum’s hum is caused by the millions of tons of automobiles and trucks and buses rolling up and down its hollow streets around the clock. Just think, a blind person must have both the sound and the trembling of that hum or roar going throughout his or her body all the time. That’s why blind persons can play the piano so easily; the piano is an instrument based on a system of touch, its keyboard logically laid out so that a person can sit at it, put both hands forward in a natural manner, and find that their hands spread out naturally on those keys to allow their fingertips to fit perfectly naturally onto the standard piano keys (electronic piano keys are much narrower than the keys on a Steinway grand say), already in an opposing thumb order, already to be let down on those keys to where just the sensitive tips of the fingers strike down to hit those keys and form sounds, sounds easily felt through the touch, the sightless mind immediately learning the keys and notes and the chord patterns that can be made from those touchings and the eventual dissonances and harmonies that can be deciphered from striking the keys—and with one finger or with all ten fingers at once. A blind person’s ears are their eyes—and damn, if we could see as well as we hear, we’d, like Superman, have X-ray vision. Wow, blind people do see with their ears.
I knew this blind guy guitar player from New Orleans, a god-damn whiz on the guitar—Jimi Hendrix was his master—he only knew it was Jimi by his sound—isn’t that fascinating? He didn’t really know Jimi was a black man. He only knew him as a guitar sound. Isn’t that amazing! It is to me. But then I’m awfully dumb. But, anyway, this blind guy could tell when a cab was coming—I swear, I swear—I know, I know, everybody has a blind man story, but I swear this dude could tell a cab from a regular car. I’ve witnessed him doing it. The only time I ever met the jazz master Rahsaan Roland Kirk he was hailing a cab—on Broadway and 48th (one end of old music store row—just about gone now—boiled down to Manny’s and Sam Asch owning all the stores—Manny’s and Sam Asch merging to boot, so it no longer matters—and besides, there’s a music store down in SoHo that blows 48th Street away these days—though the only place I can find the best selection of harmonicas in NYC is still on 48th Street). I said, “Peace, Brother Rahsaan,” and he replied, “Where?” That’s blind, brother.
So in the still still remaining after I wake up, I read. Then, after I’m totally relaxed from reading, with a head full of thinking going on, I flip on the idiot box and channel surf. I know the line up starting at six. Barney’s doing his or her (Barney’s voice sounds like he’s a he, but who the hell knows—how much about the sex life of dinosaurs do we know?) weird shit on the PBS stations. On the networks, the morning-show robots are coming alive, most of the men extremely handsome these days—I’ve just noticed that!—the women, on the other hand pretty much stick to a same ole-same ole teevee babe style, same executive-suit-style clothes, same hairdos, same eyes, same phony smiles, same condescending attitudes, mostly pre-mother girls practicing treating people like mothers, you know, with motherly advice throughout their delivered reports. The handsome dudes are all Mr. Nice Guys, dumb as oxen but charming as leprechans—God, they are irritating. I watch these network pompous nobodies to ridicule them. Then there are the early morning evangelists, including the weirder-than-Barney Benny Hinn, whose on at six, followed by old Yahoo Okie-Texian clodhopper bullshitter deluxe Kenneth Copeland—and if you knew the Copelands like I know the Copelands—I grew up next door to a family of Texian Copelands in Dallas, so I know—you’d know they’re white trash deluxe, all of the boys mamma’s boys, “mamlish boys,” as Muddy called ‘em in song. And this morning the Copelands, Ken had his Arkansas hillbilly wife with him, were talking about an earthquake somewhere they had recently survived. They were in a hotel in some distant place holding one of their money-making Yahoo tent revivals, except these tax-free money grubbers now rent the largest auditoriums in cities to hold their tent revivals and medicine shows, which is all these hillbilly evangelists are except for Benny Hinn who is so weirdly composed—he says he’s Israeli, he looks Bombay-Calcutta Indian, he’s from Canada, so who the hell knows—he seems to prefer hillbillies and white trash as his basic audience--big fat white trash babes right out of the hills, wearing Mickey Mouse teeshirts and jean shorts to Benny's Midway sideshows—though isn’t that the case of all of teevee—white trash glory! That’s what teevee is. Totally white trash programming. Check it out. Soap operas. How white trash are those? Newscasts? Totally white trash. Teevee commentaries? Totally white trash in focus and comment. White trash are Yahoos supreme. The dumbest of the sucker dumb. Want to see them in all their glory? Go to a Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart was founded in the heart of hillbilly heaven, in eastern Arkansas, by old Sam Walton, a hick bible salesman turned dry goods king. Hell, yeah, Wal-Marts push the cheapest crap in the world because their original customers were the dumbest hicks in the white trash world, Arkansas being a white trash heaven on earth—and I must apologize to a couple of my good friends who are Arkies by heritage and not birth—though, hell, I should talk, I married an Arkie girl.
So Kenneth Copeland spent 30 minutes bragging like a gamecock on how fucking scary it had been and while the earthquake was going on, he and his hillbilly baby were in their hotel room and the room starting shaking and trembling and Mrs. Copeland said, “Lawsy mercy, I was on my knees praising God, and I’m sure the whole hotel heard me praising the Lard, and Ken was dancing in the spirit and we were not afraid because we knew God was protecting us. And when the quake finally stopped and we stepped out into the hallway, we ran into a woman and all she could say was a horrible word that I can’t repeat, but it was explicitly horrible and praise the Lard I thought what comes out of your mouth at a time of crisis like that is what you really are. So while nothing but praising the Lard was coming from Ken and my’s mouth, nothing but vilification and blasphemy came from the mouth of that woman. You are what comes out of your mouth anyway.
Damn. I didn’t know that. I’ve been in one tremor—in Portland, Oregon, as a teenager visiting an aunt and uncle out there—and when it happened, I got wide-eyed, yeah, but I didn’t panick to the point of praising any Lard; in fact, my aunt and uncle laughed it off by saying it happened several times a day in Portland so I might as well get used to it. However, if I were in a really bad earthquake, I’m guess I’d be safe because I’m sure I’d be saying “Jesus F-ing Christ! God-damn! Jesus GD Christ!” That’s what I usually start growling in disastrous situations, though I don’t really know that since I’ve never been in anything worse than Hurricane Betsy in New Orleans in ’64, which at worse was exciting, though anticlimactic in disaster. I can only imagine how I’d’a been’a cussin’ like a sailor had I been in Katrina. Don’t get me started on New Orleans. That’s such a shame and yet it’s slowly fading off into a forgotten position in our rapidly developing and evolving history.thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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