Soundtracked

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

'Sup yo? Back for another foray into "Pursue the Horizon - Open for Signups" , in part because I enjoyed the experience of writing the last entry but also because I wanted to reread some Richard Brautigan and well...here we are.

But first, some background (even though I've probably already talked about this/him several times before). Between 1997 and 2002 I was gainfully employed by a local electronics retailer based in Western NY, Stereo Advantage  . I cycled through various positions at the company in general and at one point was banished to the Video department of the flagship location due in part to some sketchy behavior (undeservedly) attributed to me which also coincided with me having the nerve to actually want to use my vacation time during a slow month so I could move into a new apartment. But that's another story for another time, I guess.

During my time at the now-shuttered 5195 Main St. store, I got to know and become friends with a lot of the staff...prior to that, as a co-manager of one of the area mall stores, I was only required to be there for one shift and one meeting (maybe two) a week, so I didn't really have much pull in the building until I moved over to there full-time. For some reason, being a regular part of the staff at 5195 usually carried more weight everywhere than being a manager of one of the offshoots. But whatever.

One of the guys I got to know well was Bink. He was the brother of the manager and ran the Audio department...and on the side he was a drummer in a local band. When I slid over to my demotion/not-demotion at 5195, we'd hang out sometimes. When I needed a ride to work, he'd swing by on his way if we were working the same day. And if we closed the store on the same nights, sometimes we'd head out for beers if he wasn't playin' a show. We'd go to this little local mainstay down the street, Loughran's  , and bullshit about the company while playing the jukebox and gettin' sauced. While still dressed in our company attire, usually ...cuz when you work for The Advantage, you're basically gold in those parts.

And so in the course of one of our many conversations, it came out that I wrote poetry. He asked me who I'd read, and at that point the list was very small. I was maybe 25 or 26 by then, but hadn't accumulated enough knowledge outside of my own works to speak of besides the basics that most everyone who writes has read by then...Kerouac, Poe, whatever nonsense junior high crammed down your throat, etc. He suggested Brautigan to me and showed up the next day with...somethin', but I don't remember what. Might've been his copy of Trout Fishing in America/The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster/In Watermelon Sugar  ...or something else, but that's what sticks and maybe that's because I owned a copy of it as my first real Brautigan purchase. While In Watermelon Sugar remains my favorite Brautigan read (and easily an all-time story fave), The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster sits between the two in sequence as a poetry collection, and in this version it opens with "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace"  .

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

For being basically a bitter, womanizing drunk-turned-hermit more or less, he was ahead of his time. Not in the way he turned plain stuff into fantastical re-imaginings. Not because he invented some crazy form of poetry or adhered to certain values in the name of something sacred. Not because his curiosity turned him into something of a strange-famous hybrid. The Pill was published in 1968...computers were still in a prolonged infancy, and the connectivity we've come to associate with them wasn't even a slobber-drop of dollar signs in the eyes of a Jobs, Gates, or Zuckerberg yet. Like, yo...Brautigan called it here (and if you need further proof, one read of In Watermelon Sugar is all you need to convince you, being that it revolves around a place known as iDeath...long before there was an i-anything).

The self-deprecating optimism is trademark Brautigan, evident in most of his work in one way or another. He doesn't take himself too seriously, but he knows he's gotta be on to something here. Whatever the reasons the internet as we know it as was created for- and in part it was meant to resemble something like his description, at its basics- it's a true shame he wasn't around long enough to witness the rise of online dating, cat gifs, and porn websites. As traveled as he was, he woulda loved that shit. And I would also be interested to know his thoughts on all of it...or what a 21st Century Brautigan has in his/her omniscient mind for the 22nd. Hey, if you can wonder what so-and-so or such-and-such in your hero world of choice would do in this day and age as opposed to the setting they were scripted into, it's fair to let me have this. Let me have this!!

“'It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!' -Friedrich Nietzsche. Are you always aware of the reasons for your opinions and the way you think? And what do you make of Nietzche’s quote?"

I will readily admit that there are times when my opinion on something overshadows the very reason why I formed it...but I also think that's natural.

Opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one over time turn into our own little facts...the very facts that make us who we are. And sometimes those opinions were forged from facts...hopefully. Debunking a childhood myth isn't a great experience, for example. It can leave you cold and untrusting for awhile, but you've lived your life for so long believing something and living a certain way because of an opinion that it's become your truth...be it about you or pertaining to your personal history, or Santa Claus, or speculation over whether or not a fictional character in something written hundreds of years ago is gay. And some are easy to move on from with new knowledge in the back pocket, while other times it shakes you to a death of sorts in the core of who you were up to now.

I have opinions, because I'm like a grown-up age. These are facts. And I try to base my opinions on facts, because that is crucial currency when it comes to things like personal integrity and another thing I can't think of the word for but there's a word I wanted to use, believe me. Guess that's the thing I'll wake up to well before I'm sposta tomorrow morning .

Truth is, most times the convictions (hold up...that might've been the word ) giving birth to the opinions almost always become long-forgotten in the grand schemes of our histories. We may know why we hate wearing the color red, but do we really remember the terrible red ensemble we put together that in retrospect never should've been on any store's hangers let alone our bodies? Hellllll nawwwww man. Sometimes we just need to block out the horror, and after awhile it's so ingrained in our inner being that we're like "Nope, can't, cuz it's red...but why don't I like red again?"

Nietzsche is alright with me, if only because I see his name and think of an old football player of the same last name, and anyone who says that name like "Nee-chee" and not "Nitch-ski" gets props, especially if I'm totally butchering it based on personal preferences. I forget what I was goin' for here...musta been sidetracked. It happens.

I guess, the facts that wreck us also shape us, and it's good to keep them in a card catalog of sorts that gets sniffed on occasionally. Being required to always know the whys of something I feel strongly about would send me into crippling panics, and I'm not that adult yet where I can absolutely defend stupid decisions from years past without caring about consequences or doubts. Opinions are kind of our "this is where we are right now" statements. Sometimes we care enough to school/get schooled, and change them to fit our current needs/wants/haves. Sometimes we grow out of them only to remember why we have them years later. Life moves at rates too intermittent to be held into one opinion for so long, especially when you're finding yourself on the wrong side of history (past or present). If you educate yourself on the opinion in question, taking into account information from sources who won't always tell you just what you wanna hear, you'll be alright in the end...when you've got the credible info (fuck...that might also have been the word I was looking for earlier in this entry ) and you can stand behind it against the lesser-informed, who use their opinions as a shield against the reality, what's there to worry about? That's less fear you're sleeping in, amirite?

To tie this entry into a big fat bow, Bink also got me somewhat into The Flaming Lips (part of working for The Advantage was that we all had nicknames; mine was Bert because it was short for my full name and apparently much cooler than my real name). He threw some songs at me and while I'd already known they were interesting in a way, I just never had anything else to go by (again, back in the prehistoric Internet ages).

"All We Have Is Now"   -The Flaming Lips

"As logic stands, you couldn't meet a man who's from the future.
But logic broke; as he appeared, he spoke about the future.
'We're not going to make it;' he explained how the end will come,
'you and me were never meant to be part of the future.'"

It's habit for me to think of Bink when I do anything Brautigan or Flaming Lips. Like, that's my center in those Venn Diagram circles. Great guy and one of a few I truly love and miss from that era of my life.

While wondering why a bus can smell so amazing and disturbing at the same time...

I know this is only of importance to me, but I'm really impressed with my discipline as it pertains to only eating the food in my fridge. Specifically, not going to the Pita Gourmet   in Cortland. Like, I've been dying for a gyro w/extra Feta for so long, but no...clothes and music and apartment stuff came first on my list of things to spend money on, while also being responsible about food. But my gawd I'mma need me some of that soon.

Speaking of which, it's well-past dinner time here and I need to get me some...food. From my fridge. Smartly, so's I don't feel like a rock the rest of the night. Boring day otherwise, best believe that. Peace, all we've ever had was now, and GOODNIGHT NOW!!

The sounds alone seem to mean we're doomed...
just as nature intended.