all paintings by donald roller wilson
This week I dove whole heartedly into the world of my mountain friends. It's been a good week. It brings to mind in feeling the week I spent delivering a cd I'd made of all Jr Maxwell's known recordings and took copies around to everyone I knew who knew him. It was my gift to them for receiving me into their lives as one of them, with that kind of trust. I had printed 100 copies of the cd and spent the week giving them individually by hand to each one. It was a beautiful week full of love. This has been such a week. Told that I was wasting my time with the mountain people as they are of no consequence, I'd benefit myself better sucking up to the middle class. I've been laughing all week over the presumption that the white suburban middle class has something to offer of interest to me. I've been of at least two minds on the matter, contempt for a meddler's belief that my business is hers and gratitude that the meddler put me into a week so far of review of my mountain friends and neighbors, people I value, people I look up to, the people of my heart. When somebody cuts down my people from ignorance, I stand up for my people as they would stand up for me. If I started going to beach music dances with the white middle class, my friends at home would be asking what got into me. I'd be asking myself the same thing. Who put lsd in my coffee?
This week has brought forward my love for the people of these mountains. I can't say I like them all, but I can say I love them all. I feel like a dog adopted after being lost and abandoned. I love the family that adopted me as though they were my birth family. It just happened that my soul found a body originally in southern California, then was transferred to Kansas City, Kansas, American wasteland. I felt out of place all the way around. Didn't know why at the time. My mind was having a difficult time in those years beset by the head rooster in the chicken house, who happened to be undiagnosed insane. That was very difficult to live with, especially when the insane one rules everybody in the house. It was a case of self-centered unto insanity. It was one of those situations like our present Congress. I can't change it, but I don't have to subject myself to it. We never bonded as father and son. I can see from pictures of myself at age 2 with knotted brow and a frown, and I know what it was about. First, drawn to the South to get as far away as possible, to the coast, then to the Southern Appalachians, the Blue Ridge. During my first summer in the mountains, on a Saturday I was in Van Pruitt's car, him driving. We passed a field full of flowering black-eyed susans. I felt that I had passed the point of no return in that moment.
This subject has been in the front of my mind all week long. I have spent the week celebrating the mountain people I know, in my heart and person-to-person. As I visit with each one I note what it is I like and love about them. So they haven't had the educational opportunities of the middle class and the ruling class. The middle class is now getting a taste of being shut out by the ruling class the way the middle class has shut out the working class. What goes around comes around, bay-bee. I don't like the way the ruling class treats the rest of us, so I don't participate. I've learned over time that fickle behavior goes with money. The more money, the more fickle. The middle class has been hysterically upwardly mobile until Reagan (Mammon) they worshipped set them on a downward spiral into the working (peasant) class. I taught myself years ago never to trust anyone of the ruling class or anyone of the middle class. I don't like fickle in people I associate with. Somebody plays fickle on me the first time and I'm gone. Then you have people in the working class longing to get into the middle class. They're fickle too. I like to stay in the bottom ranks of the working class. Don't have much money, but I have true friends. The people I associate with are true. I'm glad the middle class looks down at me. Climbers tend to ignore me as a staircase to nowhere.
During my school years I did like I was told, aspire to money and more money, money only. I don't know where I got it from, but as far back as memory goes I've wanted to live an authentic life, devoid of hypocrisy. I can't say I've made it, because other people could answer better my hypocrisy quotient than I can. Too subjective on my part. I doubt, however, hypocrisy is a word that has meaning in my behavior. I don't try not to be hypocritical. I just deal honestly with everyone I encounter. If my honesty is a problem for somebody, then go find somebody else. I don't do dishonest, but I can be misleading when somebody attempts to make my business theirs. We all have our rights. When somebody crosses that line, they're on their own. It happens rarely unto almost never. But when it does happen, I'll say whatever I feel like saying. If Miss Priss had stuck around for conversation after telling me what her gossip set believed I needed to hear, I'd have fed her a line of shit a mile long. But she got her mission accomplished and was gone. Once, I told a middle class invasive personality that Justin was my grandson and I turned him on to pot when he was 12. My way of saying I'm a crazy emeffer, leave me alone. Like my grandmother used to say, They's more'n one way to skin a cat.
Driving home from the coffee shop in town I was thinking about this wave of joyous feeling that has been with me all week, wondering if an equal spell of feeling down and out, depressed for balance would follow. A spell of joyous feeling in the past has been followed by a spell of depression. I don't see it happening this time. I've approached this time of "good" feeling without attachment, without thinking I'd like this to last forever, without even wanting it. Just happy to accept. Thus, I don't anticipate a spell of doldrums to follow, because when it's gone I won't have the feeling I lost something. It feels like this wave of affirmation that came to me this week happened of its own without ego. Maybe when ego is in it, then the balance needs to occur. I don't know. Will wait and see. I don't recall a period of doldrums after the wave of joyous feeling during the week I took Jr's cd around to his friends. The joyous feeling in that time o'er took me by surprise. I didn't set out to do a good deed. It was a thank you gesture to the people of Jr Maxwell's life for receiving me as one of their own. It's looking like I came into a place where I don't anticipate or expect anymore, but allow whatever happens to be, without criticism or complaint or making a big deal of it. I observe and assess, but try to keep it at that. I look, I listen, I learn.
*
No comments:
Post a Comment