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 55th
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