July 17 2008 "Asides on Hardway"

08.07.17.odt                                                       (asides (?) on Hardway)

(I've also come to the entertaining of either Bo or Able?, or.. I had one other... butch...aw fuck, I can't remember...it'll come to me...)

     During my boyhood, I was kicked out of school at five, seven, ten, and twelve years old; and spent my third year of high school in a boys' reform school. This set the rest of my life up determined never to get my idiot self locked up again. In this, I have succeeded. I couldn't count the times I probably should have been, but just never had to fess up; except to myself, that is—I do keep score: Don't we all?       This tendency toward so-called unruly behavior was urged upon me--in self-defense! or so I think I must have thought then. Urged by the negative ambiance of the times: WW II. No men around and all the women very shook up. I think I got overly indulged in by all those shook-up women; and scoulded a lot too. Got my little butt paddled regularly: I know I did, although I haven't the faintest memory of this. I waddled off out from where I was supposed to be or stay and when I was, at last, after frantic search, located, spanked, and dragged home for everyone else to frown at me and put me down for having wandered off. But I didn't know nuthin: hell, I wasn't even talking that much yet. I mean, don't get me wrong: The many female garegivers of my early youth were from good stock;  maybe overly-educated for who and what I was and am, and what piques my interests and senses of things; and definitely more upwardly-mobile-oriented than is I believe is my truer birthright. Call me balmy and misguided, but this is how I sense this series-of-evolutions that has been my, by now: alarmingly-long life's impression upon me, and how I tend to think of myself. For a darn long time, the negatives over-balanced the positives. But that has since turned around, I am glad to report. Positivism delivers! It's easy, really—at least this is how it appears to the boingy thinker clanging away in here—all it takes is to be constructive in the nature of all that one does: Very similar to, if not the same as the golden rule, but not just unto others, but in thought and action covering all the bases of the known (and, hopefully, unknown, as well...someday...) universe. I believe that there is no such thing as inanimate. Every tiniest thing is in motion at all times—except, I suppose, when it decides to take a break; which it surely must do sometimes, because I take breaks--this me here.

     But I am trying to get down to the more, hopefully, meatier stuff soon to come; but first you must understand how this Hardway character of my own mind's making, they tell me, is a semi-desperate young soul in search of some sign or symbolic sense of his wayward life, as he faces twenty-ninth year. The big three-oh loomed uncomfortably close on the horizon, and he was still single, drat. It's all those overbearing women from my childhood giving me a bad attitude, I guess, because I've blown enough potential relationships with the other gender of my human race to assume this. I forgive myself and go on with what I am dealt; I have surely been dealt. It's a dream, really. A many faceted one in which many seperate lives are led—by me, that is. I can't vouch for how others look at their lives; hell, I'm just having a heck of a time getting this book-writing thingy that has been swizzling around inside my cranium for nearing a half-century, and now demanding: out!

      Those same consarned troubled war torn, heartbroken women who nurtured me along to age five, also taught me music. and it has paid me with pleasurable sensations ever since. The good time with the doin gave me relief from being just Hardway. I got lost in it while it was happening and with whichever band it was that I was playing in or with at the time, and that's all that really ever mattered, way down deep in some subliminal byway, or whatever; plus the comradie, the sense of being a part of something larger than myself—probably mirroring human's supposed desire for companionship. Although I quit doing music-for-money in my twenty-sixth year, I really haven't stopped playing music for my own pleasure: it 'suits' some probably unknowable inner resonating part in my psyche or dna. 

     Me? I was diagnosed with anti-social tendencies, among other things, by a psychiatrist that my parents sent to see for a couple months nearing the end of my freshman year in high school, at thirteen. This must have also been at about the time that I gave up being a cooperative piano student in favor of the far-more-portable guitar as my instrument-of-choice, and holed up in my bedroom for a couple years while learning how to play it. This was just prior to my incarceration in reform school as I turned fourteen. Now that I think about it, that was the first time, and it was only a week in juvie. The second time took up most all of my fifteenth year of being alive. The lesson-learned there was, at base: one does not steal, nor commit other prosecutable offenses.

     Now: Salvage is another story, and it's salvage that this story stems from, because my other brother: mister Hardway there, here, peering over my shoulder at this very moment, and trying his level best to persuade me--the other guy sharing his brain--to do all this typing for him, had to go and get all excited every once in a while about going off and digging some wreck off some reefs or up from a muddy grave; and if that's not enough: to resurrect, by good old tried and true traditional ways of patching up anything made of wood. That's the beauty of it—if one can think of the donation of many little bits and pieces of one's skin, which seems a prerequisite in pulling off salvage work, as beautiful. It's not all work: Some of it goes easy enough to be just downright fun, and lets you get by with only minor scratches and or bruises. I guess it must have been sheer luck that Hardway and me didn't get our lunches handed to us, because, believe me: I know how this Hardway fellow operates and we both been two one damn bunch of lucky sons of bitches!

     Now, all this me, myself, and I business must begin ceasing and desisting if we—us others—you, me, him, and her—are to maybe soon get into why I am trying to explain what went on, why it did, and wha'hoppened.

 (these should be thought of   only as notes-to-myself for further perusal and possible revision for insertion somewhere in the book at some later date...))