My friend Shale -- to whom this epistle, number 21 taken from a string-tied folder dating back to the end of the '80s, is addressed -- was and is a prodigious reader. We used to scour the used-book stores together in Berkeley. Other than that our time in college was spent drinking coffee and reading in one of the city's many cafes; either that, or drinking beer at night and talking about books. Hence my description in the fourth paragraph of my current reading projects.
I had stopped exercising the summer of 1989, probably the only summer in my adult life I didn't run at least on the weekends; and, with the regular malt liquor habit I had developed, it was beginning to have an impact on my health. The complaint -- the time crunch -- of the rat race remains just as true today, twenty-five years later, as it was then.
The final paragraph picks up the story of the apartment pot farmer described in letter number 16.
Summer 1989
I've just finished a couple of cups of coffee and am now heading on to the beers. A cold quart sits waiting and watching just off to the left. The day at work is four hours long gone and HUSKER DU sings to me from the turntable; the ever-present girth of blubber is battering and lapping against my belt buckle.
It was good to hear from you the other day. What was that, a couple Sundays ago? I had just polished off my ritualistic two quarts of Coors and one quart of Colt 45. I was glad you tried me again because three days earlier I had called using your old number and got some boring cunt's answering machine; and of course since I have the gene porcine somewhere in my morphology, I was too lazy to promptly dial information. So anyway, I had just finished my three quarts and the phone rang and I was too bemused in malt liquor reverie to pick it up, and what you know? It's the good old berating flabbergasting voice of my soul buddy Shale.
The little anecdote that I'm trying to work up to is the one that I'm going to tell ya right now. You know how we had been jawing for so long into our respective receivers? Well, my bladder eventually came down with a considerable ache, but the deal is I didn't want to excuse myself to the pisser and waste your time and money. So I grabbed the pitcher that Ashley uses to water the plants and I worked my cow's udder out through the fly, and I let her rip. The only reason I mention this is that I got a call at work from Ashley. It was a Tuesday. You had called on Sunday I think. She calls me up and asks, "Did you pee in anything of mine?" I drew an absolute blank. The question meant nothing. What the fuck was she talking about? It was like a meat cleaver swooshed down out of an enamel blue sky while I played solitaire on a picnic blanket in a green cow pasture. Shit. I had absolutely no idea. And then she said, "Because today I went to water the plants and the water in the bucket looked really yellow. I thought it was just old, but then I smelled it, and it smelled like piss!" Okay. Sure. Now I remember.
I'm still doing my reading. The only problem is that I don't have enough time to get any of it done. With eight hours spent at work and an hour commute tossed in each way, you aren't left with a lot of time for intellectual pursuits, especially after you include the obligatory shower, shit and shave in the morning, and dinner preparations at night. Same old sob story. The titles I'm working on right now are ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE by Lucretius, and PHILOSPHICAL LOGIC, a compilation edited by P.F. Strawson. There's a bunch of stuff I need to finish, like Ryle's essay, "Systematically Misleading Expressions" and that Leibniz collection put out by Scribner's Sons, and Baudrillard's SIMULATIONS. What a fucking pessimist (in the most malevolent sense) that guy is; in fact, of all those poststructuralists (it should be said that Baudrillard considers himself a post-poststructuralist) I like him the least, if at all; he seems (now remember, I haven't read that much, only a hundred pages or so, so take this with a grain of salt) to be lathering himself up a pretty good self-satisfied sweat by sneaking into a hall closet and whipping Rousseau's skeleton-dead pony with a fat leather belt studded with paperback copies of McLuhan books in French translation. SIMULATIONS boils down to a banal, seltzer-water-and-lemon aping of the ECONOMIC AND PHILOSOPHIC MANUSCRIPTS OF 1844, with a few fashionable points about the epistemology of the electronic media tacked on for a nice blow-job effect.
Fifteen minutes earlier a thought occurred to me, something that was certainly plenty true, and I was going to share it with you. But the sad thing is that I've already forgotten it. Blame it on the beer. I'm working on it though. As I write this very sentence, I'm trying to get it back. Dag nabbit, I can't do it just yet. It goes to show ya that that story about Hobbes is one true tale. Apparently Hobbes never went anywhere without pen or paper; this because he knew that no matter how powerful the idea, no matter how clear his construction, and no matter how hard he tried to remember what it was that he wanted to remember, there was no guaranty that he'd be able to keep it -- unless, of course, he wrote it down. Hobbes thought he did his best thinking on his long afternoon walks. So in the top of his walking staff he had a compartment that housed a tablet of paper and a little quill. Why the fucker didn't just carry them in his coat pocket, I don't know. But the overall idea is exactly right there and quite mature if you ask me, namely -- don't ever think you can beat or ignore the arbitrary crackle of the synapse, or, in better, more ethical words -- respect first, always, and ask questions later.
Jeff came up for the weekend a little while back. We ate a lot of pot. You see, Ashley is growing a bunch of plants in the living room and everyday they shed a substantial amount of leaf. So in the morning, Saturday morning, Jeff got up and circled the room with a Tupperware container and harvested the shake. Then he went into the kitchen, put a skillet on the stove, plopped in a touch of butter, added the leaves, cooked them for about ten minutes, and then served them up by forking them on top of a piece of rye toast covered with strawberry jam. After about a half hour we were completely wacked -- and we stayed that way for pretty much the rest of the day. We managed to stumble out of the apartment and make it down to a couple of hot dogs and Central Park. It was a good time. But going into work on Monday, on Tuesday, shit, all the way to Wednesday, I felt like my brain was a fat rump burbling on the back of an old Harley, like I was a black monkey fingering its turds in the pet shop window on Main Street.
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