XIII. U.S. Highway 59. Laredo.
Nuevo Laredo Bridge Parking Area.
Population: 91,449
Elevation: 500
Climate: Near-desert.
Topography: Near-desert.
Historical Oddity: Santa Anna paused here on his way to the Alamo. A
banquet was given in his honor in the home of Manuel Gonzales.
Telling Detail: No effort was made to extend Texas government to the area
until 1846.
Prominent Amenity: Nuevo Laredo generally; Boy's Town specifically.
Category: Ranching.
Best One-word Description: Unique.
Insight: America's only authentic Third World city.
1. Desire breeds breeders. Repressed desire breeds destructive breeders who are too clever
by half. How shall you know them? Easy: power is the short-lived aphrodisiac of the
destructive, and money their sand-packed vaseline.fn1
–Horny Teen
* * *
2. Isolation breeds contempt.
–Fritz
* * *
3. Retribution comes. Unknown forces strike unknown balances. The
vengeful are dangerous to others, and fatal to themselves.
–Mahalia
* * *
4.
–We had company last night. Didn go nowhere. My brother-in-law and sister come down
and had hamburgers.
–And you didn invite us to eat hamburgers?
–Oh. I don't know what to think about that. You probly a pretty good cook anyhow.
* * *
5. When kundalini stirs, the walls of the city tremble.
–Mr. Camp
* * *
5b. We are more closely connected to the invisible than to the
visible.
–Novalis
* * *
5c. Only an artist can divine the meaning of life.
–Novalis
* * *
6.
–Listen to that white boy with his two-watt hand-held!
–We clear.
* * *
7. Riffs on consciousness! The torn curtain veiling the
non-secrets of Sais! You want logic? You want despair? Go back to prison.fn2
–Wild Man
* * *
7a. Truck driver goes into this bar and sees this horse sittin at
the back with a big pot of money in front of him. Driver gits a cold one and asks about
the horse. Bartender says, you gotta put a dollar in the pot, and if you can make the
horse laugh, you get the whole pot. So the driver goes back, puts in a dollar, then
whispers to the horse, and the horse falls outa his chair laughin and the driver walked
off with the pot of money. Five years later, same driver comes in again, and the horse is
sittin there with another pot full of money. Bartender explains, it's the same deal except
not you gotta make the horse cry. Driver goes back, and does it again, whispers somethin,
and the horse starts bawlin up a storm. As the driver is walkin out, the bartender asks
him, how'd you do it? The ol' trucker says, Simple. First time, I told him my dick was
bigger than his. Second time, I showed him.
–Bar Ditch
* * *
8. Yeats howling at the moon. Yeats howling at the moon. That's
where Europe ended, and hardly anyone noticed. Syphilitic Nietzsche at least died from
trying. As for the rest, well, this fucking century speaks for itself.
–Spark Plug
* * *
9. The computer as we know it is to the 21st century as flint is
to a fusion reactor.
–McLoony Tunes
* * *
10. Freedom, or license? Both.
–Happy Marmoset
* * *
11. Shhh! Don't wake the baby.
–Wild Man.
* * *
12. New maps are maybe the most difficult of human undertakings.
–Fritz
* * *
13. Turning the other cheek is the most difficult human act. The
genes cry out to strike back.
–Mahalia
* * *
14. It is the nature of ages to glorify themselves. Mediocre ages
glorify their own mediocre leaders, art, law. Being mediocre and thus boring, such ages
seem at the time to go on forever. Only later do they pass with proper speed.
–Mr. Camp
* * *
15. As the Greeks, the Chinese, and the Indians were trapped in
Eurasia and could only make tiny forays in primitive craft and draw funny maps, we are
trapped in this century and can only make nightly forays in primitive dreams and draw
funny maps.
–Horny Teen
* * *
16. Survival Tip: Remember that nature heals–while you're
awake.
–Celia Celia
* * *
17. Dream adjuncts must be read–like the chords of a
modulation–for their affect.
–Celia Celia
* * *
18. Beware of people who use "affect" when they mean
"emotional effect."
–Mr. Snowtree
* * *
19. Beware of people who use a lot of m-dashes in their writing.
–Wild Man
* * *
20. Desire, Asia? Maybe. Maybe.
–Orange Krishna
* * *
20a. Y'all know why a dog licks his balls? Because he can.
–Mud Flap
* * *
21. Southern Europe, the confessional; blacks, the blues; the
rest, art.
–Zig-zag Joy
* * *
22. Who, looking at the night sky, can deny that God, too, is
glib?
–Fritz
* * *
23. The Greeks gave us Tiresias; the English, Milton. America gave
us Henry Ford.
–Ken Russell, Jr.
* * *
24. Nothing is lost–everything is lost.
–Fritz
* * *
25. No headache. The fundamental sub-truth, reflected primitively
in the antique wave-particle conundrum about light, is that when our present consciousness
approaches fundamental sub-truth it must speak in paradox, e.g.: all is one/all is many.
Or: neti neti/tat tvam asi [thou art neither this, nor that/thou art that].
–Mr. Camp
* * *
26. Nietzsche was half right: everything recurs, and nothing
recurs.
–Fritz
* * *
27.
–Where's all the women at?
–I got em all over here and you can't have none.
* * *
28. Tread carefully through the ruins of this century; everywhere
there are closet Republicans wearing fake hearts on their silk sleeves: T.S. Eliot, Ernest
Hemingway, Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Igor Stravinsky, Ingemar Bergman.fn3
–Jack Flash
* * *
29. Time honors the time-free.
–Pat Angeli
* * *
30. Lao-Tse pegged causality: wei wu wei.
–Hyundai Hunk
* * *
31. Susan B. Anthony pegged guilt: failure is impossible.
–Rubber Duck
* * *
32.
–Blue Eyes?
–Come on.
–Is both eyes blue or just one?
* * *
33. Novalis gave us–not the map, but the path to the map:
Nach innen geht der geheimnisvolle Weg.
–Fritz
* * *
34. Gambit. What did the redbud tree say to the dog? None of your
pissyness.
–Orange Krishna
* * *
35. Not understanding pain, we understand nothing.
–Ramrod
* * *
36. Understanding nothing, we understand nothing.
–Mr. Camp
* * *
36b. The "last judgment" is not a single day, but
nothing more than that time which we call the millennium. Each person can create his own
Last Judgment through morality. The millennium is always, always present and accessible in
us.
–Novalis
* * *
36c. The difference between truth and beauty is the same as the
difference between law and morality.
–Novalis
* * *
37. Thoughts are flowers. What do flowers know of roots, earth,
rain, sun? Everything–and they will tell it all, if you listen closely, patiently.fn4
–Celia Celia
* * *
38. The presence is the point of power. The presents are the
points of power.fn5
–McLoony Tunes
* * *
39. The number speaks for itself, always.
–Zig-zag Joy
* * *
40. All you gotta do is ask me nicely and I won't do it.
–Motormouth
* * *
41. The more constipated the society, the more it forces issues.
The Chinese learned the dangers here long ago, then, faced with the childish Western
exuberance of these latter centuries, forgot.fn6
–Horny Teen
* * *
42. Whatever else they may or may not be, the gods are subtle,
patient, nurturing–all qualities which we continue in our closeminded willfullness to
grossly undervalue. No wonder they keep their taunting, daunting distance.
–Wild Man
* * *
43. Tarzan, if you dont answer me, I'm gonna bust a gut.
–Sugar Britches
* * *
44. We will also stop moving about quite so much.fn7
–McLoony Tunes
* * *
45.
–What does the initials A-W-I on my CB mean?
–I dunno. Read the book that come with it.
–That's what I was trying to avoid. I don't like to read.
* * *
46. Consider the pomegranite tree.
–Celia Celia
* * *
47. The past is as real, tangible, accessible, and malleable as
the present.
–Tasmanian Devil
* * *
48. This platoon in Nam all chipped in five dollars apiece and
then had a drawin to see who'd get to go to the Sword in the Lake, which was what they
called the fanciest whorehouse in Saigon. Old boy from Memphis won, and off he goes for
the night of his young life. Next day he comes back and of course everbody's got to hear
what it was like. They all gather round and he proceeds to tell all about it–the
fancy gold curtains and the incense and all the girls sittin around, and ever time he
mentions somethin, he says, "Nothin like Memphis." Finally he gets to the good
part and tells about how the curtains at the head of the stairs open and here's the most
beautiful woman he ever imagined, and she come down and taken him by the hand and guide
him to her room where they's this gigantic perfumed bed. "Nothin like Memphis,"
he says. "Then what happened?" everbody starts shoutin. "Then?" the
old boy says. "then it was just like Memphis."
–Mud Flap.
* * *
49. Not having more accurate perceptions, like Demosthenes, not
having tools to examine sub-atomic particles, said, "All is atoms," we say,
"All is vibratiion." So be it. Thus: Immersed in vibrations, including–
especially– emotions, one tunes up and down and through and across the band with
one's attention. One pays attention. That's all. The accumulated long term and short term
attentions ("tunings") determine the nature and quality of one's life.
–Wild Man
* * *
Texarkana Notes
1Off the record and off
the air, Celia Celia admitted to me, while standing one cool April evening outside the
restroom near where US 59 intersects I-30, that Aknaton was her one role-model. She is
what, in certain parts of the country, is called a "wisp of a girl," and in the
Sears Catalog is called a "petite." Her small, delicate frame carries some kind
of mind, one not unacquainted with the cynical realities of human history. "Is
not," she asked me, while playing with a June bug (which come early to East Texas),
"the best argument for Aknaton's position the fact that none of the surviving,
'successful' world religions is heliocentric?"
2See solution to the maze
in the old computer game, Zork I.
3See Robert Hughes, The
Shock of the New, where word was first spread that the 20th century ended early, along
about 1970.
4For indirect, but highly
suggestive background on this curious custom, see the kundalini musings at the end of
Shafer-Zintgraff's Ancient Texans.
5Especially his best work
with Peter Sellers, the under-appreciated The Party in which Sellers, as a bumbling
Anglo-Indian actor, makes shambles of his director's wrap party.
6Billy Boy, in as neat a
bit of naive cultural legredemain as you'll find on the Interstates, here mixes Omar
Khayam and Shelley.
7Wild Man then went on to
talk about Clockwork Orange, but my little recorder once again malfunctioned and I lost
his remarks.
The Texas Tao
continues...
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