Buzzing around Chicago on public transportation with the blues again, finding ways to get by on stockkeeper wages, was not how those students at the University of Chicago existed. I used to play this game at Central Michigan, my alma mater, where I would know what the teacher was saying as they said it, as if I was saying it – an extrapolation of sorts, or not paying attention really. I did read voraciously around this period and preferred not to discuss plots but I would again extrapolate by visualizing certain passages and compare the imagery with what was going on in my own life. Like Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five – what I can recall is the author being draped in a blanket that had character of its own with all the folds and creases and beauty within shadows and bumps and texture. Described not as a blanket but as its own entity. Then Huxley confirms that the crevices of ones slacks reveals the depth of “how one ought to see.” Some other favorites were Dostoevsky, who could put you in the next room within ear shot and also help you realize which gender falls in love last. Nietzsche was clever in rambling about church and state then suddenly referring you back to what you were actually thinking at a point before, when you lost interest in his comparisons within old, yet timeless philosophy. Tom Robbins was my favorite science clown, teaching me how one actually sees at different points and spaces within the universe. Sounds like a scene from Good Will Hunting here but I’m not trying to impress since I did all that reading and this is all I can remember. I guess it’s good to know things as they are rolling off the pages. It’s also good to have a big important name, to have been here before a thousand times, to have come out of the ground while choosing our own disposition. Or atleast to write as if it were true.
Music and lyrics are my first love since I told my dad at a very young age this is the sound I like. Sound has become god to my ears. I went to concerts religiously while living in Chicago. I went to see the Grateful Dead, where I wandered the parking lot endlessly and found myself without a ticket because I’m timid, the only person outside the venue at showtime. I imagined myself as a lion statue again outside the steps of Rosemont Horizon hoping I could ask an intrepid traveler to crack my toe so I could see the look on his face when saying “NO.” But it never happened, instead I said yes to a ten dollar ticket, the last two fans to enter. I think Dark Star was played but I am skeptical now because I know “I fought the song” was yelled near me at the final song. Since those days I feel more akin to the Grateful Dead or rather I am the Grateful Dead since I’ve put so many hours into listening emotionally and with base brain, that I am enveloped. So much that my name is juxtaposed over the playing at opportune moments for me to believe that I knew about this sound happening before I heard the playing.
Lyrics get into my head so much that I will place them by meaning into daily thought at any given situation where it would make sense to say. To interpret the meaning is not always the goal but instead just to have something other than silence after someone says something simple. Perhaps at times it would be healthier to embrace silence through meditation or prayer but either way I’d be thinking words or letting sounds and vibrations pass by without categorizing them. Lyrics can be confusing too and I’ve made myself crazy trying to interject them into irrational thought. For instance, one time I was wandering around a family event and every mouth in the place was going sideways and mashing around in circles, like trying to get gum off your bottom lip with your top teeth. Strange but that’s what my mind was fixated on. I started to ruminate on the lyric, “there’s no movement in a bad mouth, it portrays a bad mind.” Just wonderful, like, is the mouth movement an indicator of low intelligence or of evil ways, or is it the opposite. Then I couldn’t remember if the lyric was “portrays” or “betrays a bad mind” which definitely makes it opposite, or was it instead not what I wanted to hear and know? It made for a rough family gathering in my eyes but I’ve always known my family members to be smart and good so for sure I was giving way too much credit to the songwriter.
When I really want to be reminded that I have average intelligence I will listen to stand up comedy and get answers to all sorts of human calamity. I mean it’s great to be offended into knowing you’re not alone in having warped perceptions about other beings and the situations that make for good or bad memories of why you are no different. In any event, the best laughter comes from, and to those closest to us.
As an American, I feel connected to other Americans through entertainment as if we all watch the same program. I watched way too much television in the eighties and nineties which leads me to believe I have common intelligence because I was on cruise control through formative years soaking up others creativity. I don’t recall now having much to say about tv shows then, accept for criticism of live segments like on talk shows, and also I had the ability to repeat some comical lines from my favorite scenes. I think the criticism came about from not knowing what was being conveyed in the moment by the celebrity, and wanting to understand why their opinion mattered so much as to warrant a spot inside my head. The writing within sitcoms was more familiar to me because the writers created dialogue about what regular people say while they watched past episodes, whether those people were near the writer or not. The idea is to present dialogue that is more fluid than live so people can identify words as similar to their own moniker. It becomes our print on that moment in time when reliving it on television as a spectator and co-writer. We all want to be heard. But I think in reality we are heard only when disrupting other peoples level of comfort. There are all sorts of levels of communication here. The less words you use the less interrupting is involved. The more words you use the more lively you become, and more open to criticism. I would rather grunt than be on television. I’ve learned over the years to respect people on camera by not even turning the television on but a few times within a week. You can tell a lot about a person by knowing what they’ve said while manipulating people on television.
Francis Erich McElroy 