I used to work at a gas station down on Nassau and North 15th-Banker Sts. The fumes would render my synapses limp by the time I would arrive home. my father suspected the fumes would make my hair fall out and replace the bare patch in the backyard. Luckily, they closed that station with a wrecking ball. The triangle lot still exists, barren, separating the "Billy Burg" scene from the Polish of Greenpoint. (the day they were filming the Substitute sequel in the vocational school across the street, they made us all fill up the deli trucks without them paying us) The view I used to have from the top of the tankers was a Manhattan skyline filled with fudged clouds of smog. I imagined what it would be like to eat a poison fudge brownie. The taste must be excellent for poison.
Arsenic in your coffee (Arsenic café...?) meets sulfuric brownies. It comes with a coupon where you get $1 off a pound of doughnuts at the Dunkin chain. Though, I must say, I was glad that the gas station was wrecked, since i wasn't making enough money to get anywhere fast. I'd have died before I found true love, as so many visionary artists who have stolen from each other over the years would say. I give them all credit for making some people cringe and cry with delight. After the wrecked N 15th station I had to go work at a printing company. The Gazette was smelly and foul with tiny mice living inside the back rooms where the giant ink cartridges were kept. i could get all the ink on my toast as I wanted, though! Black India! (no, not exactly) the interesting thing is, for some reason, they would grow bamboo in one room, cut it and split the ends in another room, before making brushes in a third. I always thought bamboo was rare, though it actually grows quite rapidly. It's been a major invading species since the colonies were set up back centuries ago. The 17th century must be grinning in it's grave. Technicolored morticians mesmerizing titular dignitaries from the western hemisphere sometimes seems unmitigatedly farcical. Pixelated screens mesmerize. I hear communication companies laughing in each others’ faces after the allusions to their divine plot are revealed through constant satire. Getting no where fast.
After I quit the Gazette, I had to go work in an office. I felt like I'd die from heat exhaustion in a fully air-conditioned room before getting any of the work done they wanted me to do. It wasn't even the fact that it was difficult; the tasks that were given to me were the easiest of tasks to tackle. The sheer boredom and mundanity of the work made brain cells pull a Cobain on Sunday. I lasted 2 years before the day came when I had to go learn things and pay for it afterwards. we all know what I mean by that.
Last I left it, the Greenpoint Gazette had burned down, the rainbow having cut a deal with the Gustapo in Greenpoint. Hey now, get me outta that deal! That’s the real reason I quite. No room for Mafioso. Find me a hat and I’ll forward you a new bit of string for the inner stitching. If you cut corners, your hat will fall off in the mildest of breezes.
So I’ve been dwelling on my failures at the Gazette for a bit too long. I can’t soon forget all that, the pulp and the endangered trees. I feel like it caused me to grow up too fast. I can always go back to a youthful existence, yet I suppose I chose not to and still do. Do I isolate myself purposely? Has it always been so? It’s all a blur really, everything from high school onwards. I can remember a lot from before that, but my perception was different then so it is all without much merit. I remember sneaking onto city buses because I felt since everyone else did it, I should simply follow along. I knew it was wrong, but it didn’t matter. I had a free pass, and the good seats by the air-conditioning would be taken up if I waited in the front of the bus. So sneaking through the back door really benefited me without taking anything away from anyone else. Of course, the person who would have sat in the seat prior to my decision to sneak through the rear door might not have air-conditioning. I was a little selfish then. But who cared? I didn’t know what I wanted, and life was dictated to me by others. It still is, but at least I know how things work and how I can change it. I was only ever bullied in junior high school, because I was white and had pimples and couldn’t play basketball or dance. Without a bit of chemicals in me, I decided to be content with videogames until I could think for myself. That came in high school, along with alcohol and drugs. Fuck all that now, though. If I need a drug, smell my hat, feed me some pumpkin bread and send out the pill to someone else.
Before the departure from the gazette, I had a man talk to me about life without pay, and how important it was to make sure you had continuous pay. I listened to every word he said, yet his meaning escaped me then. I know now he meant that I should always benefit from everything I do. For him, this mantra had monetary conditions of interest. For me, I know this is not always about money. In fact, it rarely is. I get satisfaction in the most mundane things. I woke up to a smiling chicken disguised as a cookie jar one morning and I couldn’t stop smiling for hours. The idea that you have happiness witin and that this intrinsic happiness is triggered by something is wonderful. It’s a love you always have, yet what or who can bring that out? (music, jars, de-foliated trees?) It’s the same thing with all emotions. What brings out the sadness, the anger, the regret? It’s not that simple, since it’s about ephemeral moments in our lives. Here is a little greeting, a short goodbye, and a long stare out the window. The long stare is you thinking about the greeting (the hello) and the premature goodbye (subtle rejection). This is what separates people of action and people of thought. Here is a hello, a goodbye, and now let’s go back to work. That cannot be me. No one asked me where I should live. I live in the most convenient setting so I can think of how I should live.
The Gazette left me feeling relieved that I had not learned much from it. I could never be stuck in a dead-end job like the residents surrounding me. I knew I had no idea what I could do, yet watching machines eat bamboo and tree trunks all day was not the way my life worked. The pegs they created and the empty tabloids for the residents were all products of controlled population anyway, or quotients of dividing up certain populations based on infrastructure and distance from economic strong-points. I cannot begin to imagine the genius needed to divide a metropolis. I now know the ghost of Robert Moses’ marmot haunted the hallways of that gazette. It’s been proven by crackpot alchemists, yet I believe them for Isaac Newton was also into alchemy. Well, so much for modern science and religion being two separate things. Try to organize science too much and you get things like the wacky-wall walker. Try the same thing with religion and you get everything from Calvinists to Mormons to automatons in pressed collars on television. Both are useless and boring. I say if we had a church of science nothing would ever be boring, since you can always love nature like a mother-god. -2141; Nov 15 05
Labels: excerpt, prose, retrovert, return
