Noise
February 23, 2017 Leave a comment
“For the most sensitive among us, sometimes the noise can just be too much.” – Jim Carrey – upon hearing of the death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
The cross city bus clamors out a murderous seasick solo backed by an orchestral scrum of whizzing internal combustion engines in uproarious brawl spewing invisible air and ear pollution death while begging for second gear; both instruments of audio-olfactory destruction, an offense to the ear and nose from landlocked personal space-ships bumper to bumper on the narrow streets of San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood; all, along with the antique streetcars sing out a cacophony of noise so disturbing I had to hold the phone, physically 1,500 miles away from the action, six inches from my ear.
Our story’s hero Jeff is laboring, careening up and down intensely inclined ski sloop streets chasing said bus while he screams into his cell phone at me “Man, the first thing you’d notice if you came back is the noise”. I tell him he’s preaching to the choir. The air in my environs of northern Wisconsin is so calm I can hear the sound of autumn leaves rustling along the well-kept lawns and iridescent blue birds singing their daily arias.
Writers flood into big cities, whether they know it or not, to be uncomfortable; since like the late, great Charles Bukowski opined “no one comfortable ever wrote anything worth a damn”. The city is life on steroids; it’s intensity keeping us all tense. The boulevard is a raging river of humanity and sometimes inhumanity. There is rarely a shortage of stimuli upon which to opine. Here the writers cup runneth over.
Our hero confides he’s been reaching back into his past to make that connection that sooner or later, sooner I think for some of us given recent societal developments, we all eventually make; that DNA linked memory to our roots. Jeff is currently covered by a warm blanket; surrounded by like-minded west coast social justice warriors – yet when looking back over his shoulder in contemplation of revisiting comrades from his mid-western past; he is floored, repulsed and catatonic over the addiction he sees in his childhood pals adherence to the new ersatz fascism; the redneck noise that is Trumpism.
In the same way it’s nearly impossible to escape the noise coming at us all like a Chinese parade, from eight different directions all at once; it’s the same for our natural inclination to decipher the content and arrange it in some assemblage of bite-size order. Is it as it seems? Is the new avalanche of information overwhelming our capacity to upload, sort-out and categorize it’s meaning and importance so we might get a handle on our collective future?
It can’t only be me and our hero who, overwhelmed by the noise, wish solace in heeding the wise voices from our past. Timothy Leary’s advise was “tune-in, turn-on and drop out.” Or the angelic voices of groovy guru of the day who suggest wandering in an open field for mindfulness training. Or the Birkenstocks environmentalist who insist we head back to nature and hug a tree; or the mental spiritualist that whisper meditation is the key. Maybe the best of them are the Tantra yogi’s who claim sexual pleasure is the way in and out; that the answer is a bit more of the old in and out. Being a hedonist myself I tend to flow in this direction.
Yet, with escape valves in place in case of overload and prayers to the universe for guidance, I can’t help myself wanting to sort through the noise and discover, like a pathfinder, which direction to point; for myself and others. The Stoics posited that the philosopher left the cave, examined the outside world and returned to tell the others of the joys and dangers outside the cave.
Now they’re be a noble and heroic cause; to be a fearless scout in the face of unknown dangers; to be a trailblazer for the greater good in a quest to report, interpret and transmit the findings. The conundrum seems to be we can’t translate through the noise to know what’s coming if we disengage from it.
In the end I’m left perplexed. Shall we try to make a path through the noise though we fear not knowing the answers and fear worse not even understanding the questions? Are we all just like our hero; wishing to be heroes; but succumbing to the dictates of surviving the day and reach for the safety and sanity of just catching that bus? #rednecknoise #Stoics #Trumpism #CharlesBukowski
Nick Masesso, Jr. 
America Me
June 22, 2018 3 Comments
Yes, we wander and we work, in your crops and in your fruit, like the whirlwinds on the desert, That’s the dust bowl refugees. – “Dust Bowl Refugee” ~ Woody Guthrie
A young man in Mexico,
poor enough to live in a hut
with a dirt floor,
fiercely religious,
speaks no English,
crawls across an imaginary line
in the Desert
in the dead of night
to OZ .
He labors bent over
in a strawberry field
picking my food
for sub-standard wages,
no health care,
no other kind of care,
no safety codes,
no rules that favor him.
He pays taxes to an invisible hand every payday
for which he receives nothing.
He is reviled.
One day men with American flags
festooned on their drab military style uniforms
approach.
They call out “Criminal”.
He looks around to see
who they speak of
as their well fed
white knuckles
grip his arm.
He is going home.
Migrants in Mexico
who risk the road to Xanadu
are folk heroes.
They are urban mythologies.
Those that hire them,
the Patrons,
rich and powerful,
when weighed against their brown Mexican sweat,
are the beneficiaries.
Closed borders did not make America.
Borders open to young men and women
everywhere did.
Is it a crime to cross that line?
To feed hungry children
or wives or mothers
or only to hope
to improve one’s life?
Shame on the heretics of the American dream
and legacy.
An American is not defined
by which side of that line he is on.
In Martin Scorsese’s historical epic film
“Gangs of New York”,
the war in the streets of Hell’s Kitchen
for cultural dominance
was fought between
the Nativists,
“born right” (in America)
and the foreign hoards (immigrants).
The present day debate on the “illegal”,
an unfortunate term,
smells like the stench in the 5 corners of New York City
at the dawn of America.
Take to the streets.
Strike!
Tear down the fences.
Build bridges instead.
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