The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

The language of blue meep meowed for living. Food lines were shorter and we had less to choose from. Cheeses were cheeses and everybody thinner and the non-competition, contrary to what we all thought should be the case was better than competition except in the death scheme of things which we knew little about from day to day anyway.
There was no post-modern for everything was modern and of course all literature was simply something others did who didn’t know about warm carpet and doorways and other rooms. We talked to the girls who would later become ugly or mean or old and they talked to us and we wondered if by our talking to them they would become nice later. Those who were nice then are nice now and those who are lost then are also lost now for still, everybody has to die.
As we age we get more words and more thoughts, but everything stays the same. We meet those who gave birth to our icons and they ask us for imput because we seem wise. We can’t draw yet, only think, so we offer a promise of help, but don’t understand the primitiveness of their calling cards. M&M’s have phone numbers to rooms above you. Hotel rooms that may promise anything from sewing to massages. Fat people you knew are thin. There are fewere butters and fewer breads in the supermarket and you see an original Buddha, the one that you lost that says “The Gold Coast” on the bottom, but is on the desk in the supermarket next to the artsy people who are paying for their food, waiting in a slow area for food while others move around the rest of the supermarket which is just as slow, but not quite.
There is no fear here of disappearing. You remember the girl who stopped you as your car was parked outside of the one family who aged. You forgot to bring in the fifty cents you needed to get a soda out of their soda machine. They are all in the pool like always and when they see you they are not happy to see you. They are ashamed. So you go back out to your car and pull it into a better place beside a trailer whose occupants you don’t know. Then you pull it up further to be avoid being splattered by a rain bird. They they stop. Two girls. Hispanic girls and they stop in front of your car and start talking like they are stopping for you to look at them which they are. They are young and have make up and small tits and they talk and you are interested until the black girl comes out and she starts talking directly to you. She says that these houses are all in and of themselves (or something like that), like “***** are you up there fucking?” And of course, she says, she is. And sure she could go out and do whatever she likes, but it was the jealousy and all that (or something like that) which made her stay with her boyfriend. She had a bright pink face and lips very large and red and she wasn’t pretty, but she was young and although her own future seemed bleak, being big lipped and saucy and therefore ignorant he hoped for the best for her, at least until she disappeared, which she did of course since she was black anyway and he was white.

But the main thing was that there was less in the supermarkets back then and that was a good thing. There was less to choose from and therefore there was less excitement. Everything was calmer. The good looking one said something ugly about an ugly job. You can hear the bitterness but when you attempt a joke, your brother and friend Hendrick beside you, Hendrick much thinner than he is now, of course, you find you smile widely, a real smile that you don’t remember being able to smile in a long time and she beams and all of the ugliness that you thought, or would have thought now would be impossible to remove, fell off of the pretty girl’s face (who had the body I forget to mention) and she smiles back and you know that you’ve made a connection, but there’s no way to reconnect so you walk a little bit faster and perhaps you’ve reached the sprout where Hell may be if Hell still be possible which it isn’t since walking on is of itself proper and right and therefore Heavenly and sane.
Hendrick had earlier pushed the shopping cart of a lovely and tall girl who he could never push the shopping cart for now and when he was done they hadn’t said nary a word when she went on pushing the shopping cart herself and they’d had some sort of communication which didn’t need anymore depth. I had taken to smoking the three joints all at the same time by this time, but after awhile I needed them to go out and they were all lit and when I put them in my pocket I hoped they were out completely which they were.
But it was the slowness of the day that mattered. The little inside of the store. The fact that I was aware again and nobody demanded anything of me like they do now. Since then the animal that we call society had grown long, mean, tentacle-like arms with fingers. Each tip had a smile and a reason to buy something else which you did or else be strangled by philosophy which stated: Buy me or seek another way of living. Of course, nobody would consider seeking another way of living so we would buy and buy and buy. But there bread was bread. Buddhas were Buddhas. Light orange wrappers. M&M phone numbers. Young men not surprised by it all. Thin friends we hadn’t seen in years. Artists creating 80s phenomenon cartoon characters.
And as we wind down our belief in anything other than the way that we are now. As we remember our breaking bones and newer smells, our failures and our hopes, and the way that we think we must buy in even further to the world of more breads, more Buddha’s, we learn that we don’t learn as we age, but we forget and if we are wise we learn that to forget is the antidote to less warm aisles and girls who never regain the ability to smile. And we forge ahead and a crust of ten years doesn’t seem too bad, but the crust of 20 seems interminable and irretractible and all simply because we have known of our histories, felt the warm butter of life on the bread of colored and fading carpets of warmth, walked the linoleum seas whose lines were still etched with black tiger lines, and looked around at awe at all the things that were no longer in the supermarket, and unless we did something about it, would be.
But to dance and not apologize for the loss of the tippy toes until we find them again when they’re not in ourselves, but within the thought of them and the thought of them is locked inside another place because we can’t be in the place where the original thought originated and instead we become a loner and we create a new product for the shelves that reminds us of something that is wonderful and new and something nobody’s ever had before and by the time it is over and done with the shelves are covered with such like ideas and when we go to the store all that we see are faces of people who had failed to find that one thing that they were looking for.
Then they go home in their cars and stand in traffic and see the new styles of cars in front of them. The exact style of car when they dreamed of cars as children and other children were dreaming of cars as children and then all of the children grew up and the smarter of those children realized their dreams thinking if only they could be on the highway then those other children who dreamed of the same cars would love them and respect them and play with them at recess, but by the time recess came along there was no such thing as recess, only class differentiation, and the children who didn’t make the cars went to work elsewhere and none of the children ever played with one another again so the dream was a waste of time and vision ultimately and didn’t produce the required result because of the ten thousand realized dreams keeping the other child from their bread and butter at home.

And somewhere the mechanisms for making all of the money must stop and when it does we will think to ourselves that the end of the world is at hand, but in reality it will only mean nameless bread and re-valued Buddhas. We’ve let the monster grow ten million hands, 100 million digits with 100 million faces on each which now scare us. They are our masters. They used to call it keeping up with Joneses. It is simply and actually perpetual motion. We’ve relegated ourselves to the position of the ants.
And to do this our pride must die, but it is through pride that some of us only know how to receive love. We do something well we are to feel proud and receive smiles from significant others. We feel proud so we do more things well. Needs become opportunities to contribute to the good, but as the world spins up out of control and we all lose our footings and become weightless inside of gravity, bolted only to our roads and our jobs, we start to wonder, we start to philosophize anyway until something hits us, be it dreams or memories, and we know again we have feet and we remember the way others used to have good, heavy, weighted strides in the supermarket where we would buy things, but only what we needed and then go home through the desert or the hills or even the city and live, our eyes wide open, our ability to connect intact, everything about us welcoming of advancing age, but feeling none of it and nobody insisting upon it under the guise of forever.
I push my cart and I see you.

“The trouble with being a writer is never being able to find the ending of a story so as to start fresh the next day.”
Albert Jones 2010

The trouble with the mirror is the reflection of course, the close ever close and coursing circle of you within you. They never promised you’d get a rose garden. But it’s not the end of the world. On the expansive superhighway there are your speeders and those you have left behind. The art of destroying the competition. It’s the game, I guess. It’s not real. Numbers. Before they could teach me about numbers they had to sit down and talk to me about how in the hell A could become a herd of buffalo. They never did. Oh well. I didn’t become a doctor nor a lawyer.

Most would call me stupid. No money. No name. No family. The no’s could go on forever. Regret? Sure, you betcha. Plenty of regret. Oh well, what are you going to do about it…Gain? Weight gain. What then? What’s left? What’s left for me to not to have gotten to have? Just about everything I’d guess. Oh well. Yeah, a little regret.

The sun was down now. Night again. Always night and nowhere to go no one to talk to. It’s going to be a modern hipsterevening because they’re the only ones who have the chance of being future readers after everybody has disappointed them later in their lives. But maybe that’s just the regret talking. I wish everybody well including myself and the more I let myself just be stupid like that the better I feel. That is intelligence that they can’t give you a diploma of in college.

I’m a post-modernist myself, a latent hipster myself. Diggin it. Studied mysticality and mythology extensively, at least a little bit more than normal. When I got my doctorate I told the world that it was great, that I now had a license to be nuts. Heheheh.

Susie says I’m bi-polar, but I don’t think so. I think I am something for which a name has been give only once. I would hate to think that I spend my life on a bi-pole contraption where my thoughts swing monkeylike back and forth until I am so compartmentalized in my explanation of myself that I forget that I’m the color blue. I’m not blue, but for instance. Does it matter anymore that I am the color blue? Maybe I am blue because there is a reason to be blue. That would mean I would have a whole new section of the ship to tend to to take the ship home and I’m just standing at attention all the time. Is Bi-Polar designation too unmythological? Maybe. That’s my formal education talking. You’ll have to forgive me at times.

I couldn’t make it at their cocktail parties. I didn’t feel inspired at that school either. I was meant to be a writer and researcher. Sam says he could get me a few speaking gigs on my whole Foller Yer Dreams shtick, a comedy bit, that I do about following Yer dreams. A lot of guys are trying to use this right now and it’s as good a shtick as any, Thomas in Vegas, Barclay over in London, a few others. Debbie…who is another story. Debbie and I had a fling. I hate to say it. But we had a fling. Bad on both our sides. Oh well. Like I said. Oh well. Turns out she’s a hessian or is that hussy? She’s got these claws that go out and scratch you as though she’s just trying to keep you next to her. She’s a big Jaglom film lover, but doesn’t ever get it that guys are as good as chicks. She’s like totally nothing I do and when I broke up with her she called my girlfriend who then broke up with me. Debbie. I think there’s a magician in Australia who uses it too.

The thing is that when you start telling your story because you want to you’re good, you don’t worry about others. But when you think that you enjoy it enough to want to do it all the time, even to make a living at it, you start wondering what the world was seeing and you slow down and are like the rabbit in the headlamps. We all have that aspect of ourselves. We hate it because we hate to think that we would stand there in the road staring at those headlights until it was too late. Snap out of it they say. Snap out of it. Well, you’ve got to if you are in it. But if you’re not then you shouldn’t be thinking like you were going to go back to it. That’s back rocking horse seesaw stuff.

Okay, I’ll tell you about Follow Yer Dreams. Follow Yer Dreams was something I used to say a long time ago back when you could say something and carry it around with you like a sign, before the internet. I was a dancer for a local club, a dude dancer, the kind that rocks out with the women and makes them think that not every man is a shmuck and at least one can dance and they’d gotten their money’s worth and all. When I got my Ph.d from the Oceanic I’d learned one thing. That it was mine. It was a piece of paper that I was lucky enough to be able to afford through debt and it stated that I did the work. Now, whether that institution is considered valid by those in positions of authority would be another matter. I’m not saying that the The Institute of Oceanic Consciousness is not a good school. It is, it is one of the best in what it specializes in: psychology, mythology, mysticism and the like. Highly regarded in fact within those “circles.” But it is a small world, too few dollars for every subject. Mysticism would often go out with barnacle bending and buckling.

But mysticism was where Follow Yer Dreams came from. I don’t know nothing. I don’t even talk like this, but I feel like I speak like this. You know what I mean? Nah, you wouldn’t. It was just that I was interested in the subject matter and then suddenly poof I was in the academic realm. Barkey was scratching his tit under the t.v. But when I got out of Oceanic I couldn’t parlay nothing into nothing except the university gig and that was an accident after seeing Bette Sue over at the Domgarten. Spaaten. You know what I mean.

People don’t much want to make their living like me using words and thoughts well enough to get bread and butter through them. Real bread and butter. I did. Like I say, I’m hyperactivementalogistically and that doesn’t mean that I am wrong. I am not on some radical and bad end of some pole, come to think of it, do they mean the actual pole or the two poles, or staffs really, on the opposite ends of the earth? Questions.

To be honest, to this day, I still don’t know what Follow Yer Dreams means, except now it’s out there and I make usually anywhere to four to five thousand dollars per month from it. Then the talks at the bookstores and all that and I got me this house overlooking the ocean, and it’s all good. It’s done. I’d followed my dream and gotten this house overlooking the ocean. When I suddenly looked up and wondered if I was possibly staring into the headlights. What was I doing here? What now? I had no love in my life. Single. Looking, but feeling ugly compared to past evaluations. I didn’t know what to do. I went to page 192, it’s a long book, and saw what I wanted to see:

If you follow your dreams you will not be left alone to the hounds of the world. The hounds of the world are the same hounds that you would find in hell but more real world, not as evil. But still they’ll nipping at your heel. Why? Because you wouldn’t know what to do if they weren’t. You’re human. Things chase you in your mind or you chase things. It’s a give and take, a big game of tag you’re it. So go out there and Follow Yer Dreams, because what else you gonna chase?

There it was, right there, as clear as your dreams. I’d capitalized Follow Yer Dreams. I’d trademarked it. That’s what I mean, there’s a few guys here and there using it, Thomas, Barclay, Debbie till she petered out. But I did it first. Yup. I capitalized the three words first and got the big bucks. But I didn’t mean to take away from the other stuff by doing it, but did. You see? I put a big sponge in the bucket of thought and it took everything else away. Why? Because you brought money into the equation. It’s like being at a cocktail party and suddenly saying excuse me and then whacking off right there momentarily until you are re-fastened properly enough to join back in the conversation.

That was the rabbit in the headlights as I looked out my wallwindow of sea.

I don’t like to say it destroyed me, but I will say that it is something that took me away from my original goal of really following my own dreams and doing some good work in my field and not worry about books, just publish them and be allowed to be left alone with my ocean’s hum and write.

When the capitalizations stop is when the original works begin.
So I’m there. I’m really there. That’s what I saw, what my rabbit stare turned into. It turned into a real pathway, but one thing I hadn’t really thought of was the letters. They never told me about the letters.

To Kleven Benjamin
From Lisa Wentworthy

Dear Mr. Benjamin,

I too have flown from a mountain, sailed, as you say, the way that you saw the world there blue and waiting and you yet had your wings and yet you went anyway, soared, sailed, sprouting your wings as your faith first lifted you. I too have experienced this.
I was wondering if perhaps you would like to speak at our gathering this coming Friday at 7 p.m. We are a light hearted group with mystical leanings. We are not naïve, but we do believe in what we believe. I am single and within birthing age.

Thank you,

Lisa

See what I mean? Everywhere you went there would be another one. Just when you loved them there would be another one and then they would start adding up on top of each other, but some of the things that they said. Lisa wrote back three times and by the third times I wanted to marry this girl, but then there was that weird statement about being of “birthing age.” Who says that except someone being held in chains somewhere. She seems like a Quaker. I got all the high flying ones for sure. Those were my specialty and I should have known it, but it’s the field too isn’t it? Isn’t it just that I no longer believe? Maybe. I stepped out of a lot of things on this little journey and accepted some new roles the most enormous being that of the role of “father.” An archetype. I didn’ t have any kids. I was always too screwed up to mate well. Yet there it is. It’s what paid for the view, the need of the people to have a surrogate father for 16.95 from the bookstore.

So I guess that’s why I slur back into stupidity. Why not? I’m not the story that they wrote about me. I’m just me. I was glad that I wrote Follow Yer Dreams though because I still believed it after all these years. But where does the end of the story begin? Even that doesn’t make sense.