The Ole Back & Forth

I don't know where I acquired this habit. First I update Facebook, a truly outrageous status, something that usually doesn't mean anything or much of anything. And then I answer myself, getting steadily more cryptic and senseless. I can go on like this for a while. I remember once making 11 comments in quick succession, one after another on FB before somebody intervened to shut me up.

But reading Big Sur, I see this same back and forth, increasingly meaningless witticisms exchanged for the sake of being impossible to understand. The more meaningless, the better. Like in this exchange between Jack Duluoz (Kerouac) and Arthur Ma (I don't know what his real name was, but he was a good friend of Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The pity of it is that I have no record of what we were yelling and announcing back and forth as the birds woke up but it went generally like this:-

Me:- "Unless someone sicks a hot iron in my heart or heaps up Evil Karma like tit and tat the pile of that and pulls my mother out of her bed to slay her before my damning human eyes ---"

Arthur:- "Because lady those ashcans'll bite you back and be cold too ---"

Me:- "And your son will never rest in the imperturbable knowledge that what he thinks he thinks as well as what he does he thinks as well as what he feels he thinks as well as future that ----"

Arthur:- "Future that my damn old sword cutter Paisan Pasha lost the Preakness again ---"

Me:- "Tonight the moon shall witness angels trooping at the baby's window where inside he gurgles in his pewk looking with mewling eyes for baby side waterfall lambskin hillside the day the little Arab shepherd boy hugged the baby lamb to heart while the mother bleeted at his bay heel---"

Arthur:- "And so Joe the sillicks killit no not---"

Me:- "Shhhoww graaa---"

Arthur:- "Wind and carstart---"

Me:- "The angels Devas monsters Asuras Devadattas Vedantas McLaughlins Stones will hue and hurl in hell if they don't love the lamb the lamb the lamb of hell lamb chop---"

Arthur:- "Why did Scott Fitzgerald keep a notebook?"

Me:- "Such a marvelous notebook---"

Arthur:- "Komi denera ness pata sutyamp anda wanda vesnoski shakadiroo paryoumemga sikarem nora sarkadium baron roy kellegiam myorki ayastuna haidanseetzel ampho andiam yerka yama chelmsford alya bonneavance koroom cemanda versel---"

Me:- "The 26th Annual concert of the Armenian Convention?"

And...apropos of nothing, I found this which I thought went with this entry. Why? I'm not sure...there's a rhythm to these things, but you have to just mad enough to know it, feel it, riff with it.

The following is an extract from a review in the New Yorker...this time, a review of a bar, a positive review, not like the other one featured in these pages...and it sort of riffs, Kerouac-style, there at the end:

On a Friday, people ate wilted-escarole salad with hot anchovy dressing, drank Italian reds (the smooth and earthy Ferrando La Torazza Canavese Rosso from Piedmont, was especially transporting), and listened to a cozy New York soundtrack late Velvet Underground, Cotton Club-style jazz. Friends and strangers chatted; bits of conversation floated around. ("It was spooky, the Tchaikovsky in the first half." "Learning to waltz--it's like filleting a fish." "What's playing at the Ziegfeld?") During a jazz number, a waiter walked by a beloved regular and tapped out a vibes solo on his shoulders: another surprise that felt like home.