The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

9 Turle: But I thought that you were supposed to think. Listle: No, you thought you were supposed to think. The thing was not to have to think. Turle: No, the thing was to think, to think, to think! Listle: I’ll never convince you. Turle: It’s not like you need to convince me of anything. It just occurred to me that when we no longer are asked to think then that is precisely when we must think, sort of like a burp over a period of thought that if we don’t burp over then we stay in the same place, someimes for generations. If we don’t think past those moments when all thought tells us that we are not supposed to think then we stay stashed away inside of some unthinking moment, a moment so blended in with the colors of our day that we have no sense of the difference between us and them and therefore no sense between what is right and wrong. (Listle takes out his tweezers and begins to tweeze dead skin off of his thumb) Listle: But that is precisely the point I’m trying to make! When we don’t think we allow ourselves to become one with our universe! When we look around us and see, say, that tree over there, then we are one with that tree. We don’t put anything between ourselves and that tree and therefore we need not contemplate the existence of that tree nor the existence of ourselves looking to the existence of that tree to validate our own existence! Turle: But we never pop our head out of anything and look around to see beyond this moment of sitting and seeing that tree over there either! If that tree happened to be a dead car, burnt beyond recognition, we would not be able to see ourselves rising up out of our state of being, calling the city and having them remove the car so that we may enjoy our sit on these nice park benches undhindered by such visual pollution. No, we would simply sit here uncomfortably, to some extent, but not really knowing why because we can no longer tell a beautiful thing from an ugly thing. We have lost our power of discernment. Listle: And you say that is where commercialism has destroyed us? Thurle: Yes! Exactly…! (To be continued). Albert’s play “Two Men Sit on a Park Bench”

5

This is tape number one of the Fargo Kantrowitz’z Literary Campsite. Fargo here. Well, it seems that the people here in Millsville ain’t quite caught on to the Fargo Kantrowitz’z Literary Campsite yet. I guess it’s pretty hard when you got this first show and it’s on the internet no less. Well, maybe someday I’ll be on the radio, too. I’m a performer. Just past 40. A guy who used to rock, but turned it all in so that he could have some good, ol’ fashion lovin’. That would be Moxy. Some of you locals and even non-locals know Moxy. Former lead singer of Moxy Priestess. A girl so proud and strong and beautiful that we had no choice but to name the entire band after her.  It was actually Rose’s idea and me and Ken just shook our heads yeah. We understood the Moxy Priestess energy and Rose appreciated having someone to supply it while she concocted her magical spells for the synths.  Kenneth was the drummer most of the time. He didn’t like doing nothing more than drum. He had a wall of guitars at his apartment in L.A. that was so huge that I almost, well, I almost shit.  He’s a master finger picker, something or other, guitar player and my yowling could never stand a chance even though I was the one who got famous for playing the guitar and he didn’t. Keith was our bassist. Keith’s dead now.    The Fargo Kantrowitz’z Literary Campsite Number 1.

6

Well, thank you for listening to that song. Don’t Fight. I wrote that on stage in Memphis when I thought I was going to die. I had a dream that day and something woke me up. I was being strangled by a serpent and I could no longer breathe. A kid ran up on stage and started trying to get me out of it, but I wasn’t coming out of it. I think my heart was stopping and that kid come up and start beating me until my memory sparked up and I remembered that I really should try and live. It’s hard when you live a life like I’ve lived.   The Fargo Kantrowitz’z Literary Campsite. Number 1.

7
I never thought I’d leave Jed. But I did. I had to. I had no choice but to leave him. He wouldn’t get off that stuff. Any woman would have left him and I did and I stand by it today. But then he got off the stuff and I stood by him always, but when he went back on for awhile, I left. I said goodbye, Jed, and walked out the door. A woman’s got to do that. A woman’s got to be able to say to the world “Fuck You.” At least once she does and I did when I said it to Jed. Not many people get a good Moxy Priestess “Fuck You,” but Jed did, and he heard it and saw it and regretted it immediately. He knew what he’d lost right away and I didn’t care. I just walked on out the door. These boots, you know…     Moxy

8
Dear Millsville School District,
I had an idea that might help your teachers out a little bit. Why not hire what I call “Specialized Teachers” to come in and take over a teacher’s class on Fridays? The teacher could pay 12 dollars and the school district could pay 8 dollars for each class that the specialized teacher teaches. In this way the teacher, who often feels she or he does not make enough money, could get a “raise” without having to have a raise. Fridays can be free to do all of their preparation and grading. Fridays would be like a mini-vacation because they wouldn’t have to deal with a bunch of kids who don’t want to be there and are becoming more and more uppity these days.
I just thought that this would be a good idea. You could make a list of professionals who would like to make the extra money, writers, artists, true scientists and philosophers, etc. and teachers could sign up for that true “guest” teacher. Just think of all of the creative people that the kids could be exposed to. Perhaps this exposure could lead them to an understanding of what the subject is about and why it matters at all. I strongly feel that this knowledge is lacking today in our public school system since teachers are so overtaxed and underpaid that they can barely feel the pleasure in their subject matters much at all anymore.
I sincerely hope that you would, at least, discuss the matter at a board meeting.

Sincerely,

Albert Jones        Albert

I thought that if I wrote the best story ever written then I would become immortal.

Kierney: and you believed this?

Kantor: Oh yes. I believed that if I wrote a story that was of a notion immemorial then I too would be saved the hatchet man behind me even as we speak or so it is in my daily and worst of nightmares.

Kierney: I didn’t know.

Kantor: Yes.

Kierney: Getting back to Petals.

Kantor: Yes.

Kierney: You said that you believed that you would go to heaven in a literal sense because you believed that you were made of spiritual stuff. Please describe what you mean by this word “stuff.”

Kantor: I sometimes look back at what I’ve said and the way that I’ve said these things and I wonder why the people didn’t hoot and holler me out of town for being a complete bore. But I guess that maybe this whole thing is about living longer and feeling better by living right, eating right, exercising, playing. Everything. So I realize that the world is real. It is real. My new email address is smthngns Somethingness!

Kierney: Somethingness.

Kantor: Somethingness. It’s something to have found something that will let me know that I may live in peace. A peace is allowing all of God’s children to live under the fruit of their desires. We have a duty to every child in the world. As we do have the same duty for our elders.

Kierney: That’s what you mean by Somethingess.

Kantor: Family, basically.

June 1865
Gave away that other diary to Jedediah. Don’t know why he wanted it. Was too much in it for me to keep it with me. Now that I’m on the road it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have two of them. So I keep this one now. Been sitting waiting for this sunset for about an hour. It’s been two weeks since I had a drink and my head finally feels good again. Every drink I was taking was a shovel ful of dirt coming out of my own grave. Every drink made me forget Mary and Annabelle and gave me all sorts of reasons for keeping on, but when I wasn’t drinking I forgot every single last reason and all I found I really wanted to do was kill myself. That’s the way the drink works for some people.
I’m sitting in a little place I don’t know the name of not far from the city of Los Angeles. I notice a lot the way that water comes in on the shore. There’s nothing more beautiful I think then the way those water curls boom one after the other when that sunset is just about going down. I never seen sunsets in Tennessee like I seen them here. They’re orange, orange, red, more orange and a little bit of blue.  And then they’re just gone, but they leave the clouds on fire and that’s a good sight until the stars come out and I get cold. Usually by then I got a fire going, but sometimes I wait until the last ray, I mean, that last little shimmer or glow is all gone because I want to see the night in a pure way when it’s just begun because the middle of it gets scary sometimes and cold, especially without the bottle with me any more. And the end of it I’m usually asleep for. No my favorite part of the night is just the beginning of it when I know I’m not supposed to be asleep but right where I am only. Also, this is where a little of the sadness comes in and I close my eyes to it and pray a little bit and that always makes me feel a little better, when I envision Mary again the way that she was when we were kids so beautiful wearing her white dress on Sunday mornings and my daddy telling me now that was a beutiful girl, that if I didn’t marry her someday I’d be a fool. So I did. Now the question remains: was I a fool? I still don’t think so. What’s the point of living if you’re not going to chase down a dream so obvious as Mary was. Her smile and the way that she held my hand and the way she would get distracted by flowers or a bird and then tell me stories about everything she sees, about trees and the people who live in the forests, about flowers and about how a man named Narcissus was so vain that he became one, and about the Goddess of Love named Venus who was married to a man who made her diamonds and beautiful jewels, but who loved a man who raged in war, and about Cupid and how he fell in love with a girl named Psyche and Cupid’s mama, Venus, didn’t like her so she made her do all sorts of things to earn his love. There were so many stories and they all come back to me now. How Mary could talk. And then Annabelle, well, and then Annabelle. That’s all needs be said. For now…

There are questions concerning Thy Soul’s Immensity that I just can’t answer because to do so would be to push the boundaries of where I want to go in my life. Everything we author has a possibility of final purpose. To follow these lengths to the point of obsessing on them is to sell yourself short. The final resting place aside, authors must resist the urge to disappear into their works forever. In some ways, an author must hold on to himself and steady himself or herself. The author must allow that a character may have inhabited some part of their being, but that the sad parts do not need to be literalized by that function of the mind that addresses how much adrenaline we feel in a course of a day. We need not live our lives in the parallels that we had discovered in fiction. We must release ourselves from the bonds of perfection and lapse gracefully into the mysterioso of grand Life. For this reason I proclaim that there is an end to Thy Soul’s Immensity and leave it at that.

Needing to know beyond what knowledge,
needing not me,
lays down like rags before me
I feel again instead of see.

Having always seen, always supposedly known,
knowledge anew tells me I’ve not but been tethered
to a big brown ball lowing groans and smoking,
rounding the linelessness of what-might-be illumination,
sun gowned, maybe, real perhaps, or just mimicking
the word beyond the word where the word supposedly lay

at which destination I cannot see anyway so I don’t
instead deeming it right to feel only
watching not watching while the gazeless codes enrich me,
and feed my blindness something of something
at least to the point of wanting hence feeling.

so I smile at the absurdity of longing
to know the meaning of to know

Back in 90 I was quite the spitfire. I had more red blood cells churning in my veins than just about anybody else in the world I think. They’ve gotten over that trip. Heroin use has been replaced by other things. You don’t read much about it anymore, thank God. It nearly killed me. Took me away from the love of my life more than once. Being almost eighty I’ve got a lot of time to reminisce. My wife Helen lays beside me. I think she’s asleep. Yeah, she’s asleep. So I’ve taken to writing in this journal to try to explain my life to myself. It’s not an easy thing to do. After my career as a rock and roll star in the late 80s and early 90s of the last century I did a lot of things that can’t quite constitute living in the way that most people constitute living. I spent a lot of time running from my demons. There are a lot of reasons for these demons, one in particular that I’m sure that I’ll get to by the time this journal is finished, maybe in the next one, but I’m in no hurry. I’ve got a lifetime to remember a lifetime.
I just got in a little discussion with my wife over which was the best show we ever played. I was telling her that it had to be Memphis Tennessee because of this dream I had on stage just before this ghost of my past attacked me on stage. This is a long story that I’d rather not go into right here, but it has to do with that thing I was talking about that I ‘m sure I’ll get to, the reason for my demons. I was telling Moxy that this Memphis show was the best one and she couldn’t stomach it because of what that kid did to me on stage to me. She rescued me on that one. She put her stiletto heal through that kid’s neck. Almost killed him. She didn’t like thinking about that so I didn’t push it. I don’t push bad things on my Helen to think about anymore. She’s earned the right not to have to think about the bad in this world. She prefers to think about the good, the way the grandkids come over and help her can and make pies on Sundays. The bike rides, one of which we’re going on tomorrow with Minnie, Bob and the kids. Albert and Gia might even come along. I’ll call them in the morning. Albert’s my brother. Gia is his wife. I forgot what I was going to write about. I’m getting old…fell asleep. Times up for this project. Sleep.

There is no telling about the mountains. There is no poetry for the explanation that I can think of, any poetry that I learned came to me in the form of music. Explanations were musical explanations. Words were for direction, music was for understanding. That’s because my daddy was a musician. He never made it, but he played around. Bluegrass mostly, Dylan, the Stones, anything that rocked. He always wore his cowboy hat when he played. People looked at him and wondered what he was. Everybody around Millsville where I grew u listened to country music, and my daddy did too, but he was changing in front of everybody’s eyes, introducing the town to folk, Dylan, anybody who was getting plugged in. He had little patience with people who didn’t recognize the validity of the new music coming out of the world of the late sixties; Hendrix, The Who. My father rocked.

But my father realized that rock and roll is for the elect and the few to prosper from. He became a plumber and I believe he was a happy man. He always seemed to be smiling. He loved me a lot and my brother Albert. He loved our mother a lot, was always grabbing her, playing with her, making her squeel and run away from him in playful ways. It was a good thing to grow up seeing, how my parents were in love with each other. You didn’t see that a lot back then, not now either. It was a good thing.
I remember the mountains. The last day of my life with my father was spent in the mountains of tennessee. We’d spent a week fishing and camping together. My father was teaching me how to play the guitar. That week was filled with fishing and campfires filled with song and guitar playing. He was teaching me rock, too. He was teaching me chords and how to hold the thing and all that, but he was teaching me that it was an instrument that liked to be handled, liked to be controlled. He held it like a man would handle a wrench, but when he tweeked it it would always be with a manly gentleness that I saw was a victory of something like soul over mechanism. I learned that a lot even when I had giant Marshall amps around me, it wasn’t necessarily how loud I could get, but what I could do to people’s souls during the manipulation of that power. If I couldn’t imagine myself playing there at the trickling stream then there was little point in playing. Everybody out there in that audience was looking for something like soul that maybe had been lost to them somehow, maybe that day, maybe that week, maybe forever. I needed to find the soul that music reaches to reel it in for them. When I found it in myself I then had a responsiblity to sculpt it so that people realize it’s not a rought stone, but a beautiful, cool, clear diamond with all of the answers to everything soulless in their lives.
That was my job. All I had to do was go through the moment, follow the contours of the light which was really sound and make it all the way through. Like running through a wall of fire or jumping through a rainbow, that’s pretty poetic to describe the way that I always felt I should play my guitar. I not only had a vision, I had a purpose in pursuing that vision. My purpose was to reunite others with their souls. What I was really trying to do was reunite myself with my own soul. Turns out I could only do that on stage. The less I was on stage and the more I got into heroin the less I was able to do it in a real way for myself. Eventually I fell off the face of the earth. My world had fallen apart. I’d lost Moxy to the drug. I almost lost my life, but something saved me. It was just like my daddy told me could happen when I was a kid, the day before we went back into town and before going home went in for some pie where my daddy got into an argument defending a woman and got shot. He said that when you think that you’ve lost your soul that maybe that’s when you have the best chance of getting it back. It’s then that Jesus watches over you the most. He said that maybe a bird will come down and sit on my shoulder and tell me what to do. Well, frankly, that came true to some degree. I actually found a hawk that allowed me to look into my own soul across many lonely campfire nights when I was running to something, well, running to a magic chair, but I’m getting ahead of myself. What I’m trying to say is that I almost lost my soul and my daddy had warned me that there was always hope for the man who had lost his soul. Came a point in my life where I started searching again for my soul, after losing everything in the world dear to me. I had no choice. And you know what? I found it.