How to Circle Perfectly...Without Going Down the Drain

 

HOW TO CIRCLE PERFECTLY...

WITHOUT GOING DOWN THE DRAIN

It appears that the Thing can no longer be encompassed by a fb box. Not even the Former('s)(Farmer's?) sentence. Or the latter, i guess. You see what just happened there? Probably not. Someone, maybe. "It ain't me, Man." You can't see Me." I'm not saying I'm ditching Zuck just yet, but just now, if you Do want to see me, go here: t.me@Hipgnotist

or t.me@Hipgnosis21 where this will be posted, or https://hipgnosis21.blogspot.com/ still.

Yesterday or so a sweet Little Sister of mine was showering in the hot rain that comes geysering through my little firehose like Old Faithful, (Easter/Ishtar Egg! Here’s another—hi E!), and after a bit she asked, “Sooo...what is your religion???” I thought for a split second and said that the Dalai Lama’s response to the same question was, “My religion is Kindness.” But of course, that’s not All. How could it Be? (oh—i see—not herenow though). Soon after the latter exchange, the beautiful playlist attached somewhere down below was Reminded to me.

/give certain angles\

The first NINE tunes constitute an album that Mom gave me to play over and over again on my bedroom floor with one of those crappy plastic record players for little kids that were especially cool because you could fold them up and bring them with you. Albums were a bitch to carry but I could tote a pretty good pile of cardboard 33-1/3s from the back of a box of Super Sugar Crisps or whatever, (that’s right—I thought Bobby Sherman and The Archies were pretty cool; Donny Osmond, too, though I don’t think he ever made Kellogg’s greatest hits). The album is This Time Around, by that true and incredibly Old Soul, John Bassette, (God Rest His Soul), recorded and published by “Spa” John Prusnik, (if I’m spelling that correctly), at Prusnik’s Tinkertoo Records, situated in his Rubik's cube, (lol), of a rent controlled brownstone/hippie pad/recording studio/plant nursery/leather spa/and all-’round organic fuckeroo along the right-hand, (of course), side of Hessler Street in University Circle in Cleveland, Ohio, in a year waaay the hell on back in the day, for me at least—at least, This Time Around for me.

Back in the late 60s and early 70s, when I was very small—Christopher Robin small—Hessler Street was Cleveland’s small-scale attempt at a local reconstruction of Haight-Ashbury. As true a Hippie enclave as I’ve ever witnessed. It was the first I got a whiff of patchouli, (I spend years trying to figure out what that was), the first place I ever saw long-haired, bearded gentle men, the first place I caught a rumor of Mama Cannabis in the air, (people were rather more circumspect around little kids back then). I guess I could have been as young as three years old when I first found myself there, and met those guys, and the rest of the Hessler Street crowd.

Mom, bless her crazed heart, still claims she was never a hippie. I used to laugh at her as I dredged through memories of “Be-Ins” at, (I think), Carnegie Park in University Circle during the Summer of Love and Hessler Street itself and the like. I suspect she always said that because of her once-violent opposition to cannabis, but I get her denial now. I’m no hippie, Jonathan, and I’m pretty sure not so many ever existed except for in Plato’s Forms. On the other hand...another whole piece, that’s what. Perfect Circles and all.

Bassette was a super-beautiful, traveling, haunted, guitar-toting, Black hippie that lived or hung around Hessler Street, which at the time, along with University Circle proper, was an odd island of whiteness surrounded by the dark-skinned sea that was the East Side of Cleveland. Bear in mind, the country was on fire that year, and Mom drove me across town, rolling through neighborhoods that were literally smoldering, like whatever it’s called around 55^th and Chester and thereabouts, where they still had Black Panther murals featuring Mayor Perk getting stomped in the ass until the late ‘90s. The hospital where they kept my brother going that I’ve written about was part of the University of the Circle, so we/she sort of had little choice, but I’m pretty certain her extra 45-minute trips to deliver me to the Nursery School at The Church of the Covenant and Black Mrs. Klender(or however that’s spelled)’s day-care nursery-school class was quite and downright deliberate, along with her perhaps less than subtle visits to the Pope’s house, and other efforts to prevent as lily-white an upbringing as was otherwise available in the alarmingly racist North at the time.

Don’t forget that mere months ahead of my birth I wouldn’t have been allowed to piss in the same toilet as a Brother if I had been physically capable of doing so. Now,—well we forget all that, sometimes, at least us pale folk do. (Also remember—I am perfectly free, now, and capable of physical feats that few others can match. Paul, or the Romans, or someone had it a bit off: Christ can do all things through me when He strenghten-ethes me). I did mention that I intended to argue with Paul once before, you may recall. That crazy guy. And I piss in whatever toilet is handy.

Prusnik and Bassette fitted right in. More than that—they embodied Hessler Street and the Hippie thing as if they had stepped out of the world of Plato’s Forms and donned flesh like some sort of Avatars. Hessler Street would by no means have existed at all, had it not been Created by John and John, and other folks like them, (to the extent that something like that existsed). <(Not a typo right there, Y’all. I had to add it to the processor’s dictionary. Freeware, of course).

Prusnik was almost as good a friend as a tiny, weird child like I was could hope to find in the whole wide world. He taught me leatherwork, plant husbandry, how to make kombucha, (long before it was a thing), though I don’t know that I knew he did, until just now, writing this, Section—of a very circly curlicue. The ones that came the closest to that—the conscious teaching—ever, in my Time Around just now, were the Smith family. Maybe some reading this will recall Andrew—Andy, a brilliant and kind man full of joie de vie and art and laughs. Shit. I have to pause to clear my eyes. Even with these tears I can still see. Not many people that have lived a life like mine have friends that still love them after nearly 60 years, even during the past 10 years or so. Waitaminit. I guess that last sentence is still true but on the other hand (!) not one mofo has lived a life like mine with it’s joys and disappointments, loves and perturbations, lived out in my little version of the mind/body/soul conundrum. Neither has any lived Your life with all its sameness and differentness at the same fucking time….

Imma tell you right now, you will get a bit more out of this piece if you bear in mind that we are considering Circles, here. Roundness. Perfection. Life. Love. Happiness. Maybe even free will and an infinity of tangential subject matter. But those are All Nothing. I swear to you, (and I take such oaths very seriously, indeed), that I am the happiest dude I ever met. So, ya know—pay attention. Try and keep up. This will seem to Circle around a bit but I’ll try and avoid Circular reasoning. We all know circles contain irrational Mysteries though, Right?

Dang. Suddenly I may need to pause for a slice of the pizza pie in the fridge….

Captains of Industry with their stupid fucking tightly-wrapped ego-Magick rituals with deliberate holes in them so no one can get through the tangle, (ha! Fooled them; when you do it that way, you can’t either), and nootropics, cybernetic quantum singularities and gmo nursery rhymes, their women and servants and headmasters (we don’t need no) so they never have to touch their own vile offspring or ever ever Love at all, Really.

Bassette, on the other hand, and Prusnik, the Smiths, Buddy with the husky named Emma Peel, the dying kids at Case Western Reserve Rainbow Baby’s and Children’s Hospital, (we knew the “Boy in the Bubble,” back then), were all fucked up as hell, stressed out, strung out, wrung out, and left out. But they knew how to live. Hard. And how to love. Mostly our family was a mess. So was everyone else’s. Sometimes we hated each other, but...not really. Bassette’s songs were all about being strung out on heroin, rich child molesters, ditching the city for Colorado or Virginia...and yet, he stayed. Until that one last fateful day, (for him, anyhow), when he passed through The Veil, never to be seen again on this side. If he had lingered, he’d have seen how the community staged a memorial concert for him, playing his songs to remember him by. He’d have seen how this guy writing this shit can’t do it without frequent pauses to clear his eyes of tears.

The tears are not of sadness, though there may be a tinge of it. They’re joyful, with the Joy of long history, Perfect Circles. It’s so nice on Hessler Street. They still stage the Hessler Street Fair every year, I think. I haven’t been in decades; I can’t imagine that it might really be the same. How could it be? The Smiths don’t live there any longer and the kids I knew are pushing 60. John and John are long gone from this World. Everything Changes, Nothing is Lost.

When I contemplate this sort of thing, I can tell that it’s surely no wonder my life has been as weird as it has been. Between Bassette’s lyrics, Dr. Seuss, and L. Frank Baum and Judy Garland carrying on about shit going on Somewhere Over the Rainbow, along with so many other things—well, what did anyone expect. I’m quite glad to be here, though, this side of the rainbow. Did you ever see a coronal rainbow? The half-circles we ordinarily see are just that. Only half. The whole thing is a circle, and a much more Perfect Circle than we can ever draw here on Earth, no matter how much artifice or intelligence we employ. And just where did Dorothy go, anyhow?

I’m not so sure this piece has answered Bre’s question about my “religion.” I’m not so sure it can be answered in a day, or a single write-up, or a trip to a Methodist Sunday-school where you might get asked not to come back if you ask too many hard questions, or a lifetime of bullshit. But here, in John Bassette’s songs, with me from the cradle as they say, is my religion. If you can’t understand how the whole thing adds up, just go straight to Credo: I believe in Love. Damn Hippies.

John Bassette, Next Time Around+

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fa-pRGJzFE&list=PLg13GlTHQo11AXwn3qSgV6QfgTa6ly5Ye