You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world. Octave Mirbeau, Torture Garden, “The Mission,” Chapter 8
As Spring enters robustly, like a gale filled with fragrance, a’tousled with the flung hair of amour, -that is the Spiritual “Hair” rather than the Physical, it is tyme to begin to make a List of Gratitude.
To this end, comes to mind, a young man, from The State of New Jersey (more on my gratitude to the State, later-first the youth concerned!). His name is Benjamin Maddison, a Student of Rutger’s University, last I ‘checked’ studying History and Theology.
Mr. Maddison is a man of exceptional gifts, as any that knew him, as I did, in German Class as ‘coached’ by Frau Llewellyn, and in some other smattering of more mindless classes, than less, I found as a diminutive and decidedly strange colleague to Mr. Maddison, particularly his guffaws to be most instructive.
They were guffaws that would burst out with its own ring of boister, availing one to the notion of a resident personality seeking exposure to a joyful, robust, dionyssian Spirit. That of a man who loves his barrel- be it at the Boston Party of Tea and Tar and Feather, or even the other genus of barrel in which only Irish ale is contained.
Though I never examined deep into his eyes, his mischief was known to be contagious, his use of handkerchiefs common, his habits strangely rounded, but pleasantly so. And of course the guffaw – a transcendental belch of the Inner Spirit.
He found it amusing when the young and curvaceous madamme Cohen and Mr. Andrew sitting betwixt myself, would flirtatiously engage each other under that fine and wonderfully thoughtful, considerate, and noble spirited woman, Frau Llewellyn.
‘Frau’ was a miraculous culmination of Catholic principles and decidedly more Unitarian Synthesis. She was always found to be reasonable, and in her manners she expressed the best essence of Christianity-always by deed, preaching only the various varieties of datives and et cetera- distinctions of German grammar, presently oft in an Un-German way.
While I took –and liberally made use of this classroom opportunity, to draw various maps, cartoons, designs, and patterns and helices- many of Elves, and also practiced the Elven languages and Runes, much so inspired by Mr. Tolkien, reading the volume (unsubscribed by the “High” School) called ‘English and How It Got That Away’, whilst eating and slowly synthesizing through that orifice called my mouth, trucculations of sensations caused by my tastebuds in connotation to the expression contained within sugary and salty things to match the inner essences of my thought, Mr. Andrew and madamme Cohen, toyed with each other’s navels and close proximal venues of reproductive appendages in the dilly-dallying caress of fond and purposive, open and exerted youthful Love. Frau Llewellyn condescended with a tolerance that fluctuated between bemusement and outrage.
The guffaws of Mr. Maddison, always inclined on the “underbelly of the puns” provoked, titillated, and never bored the quiet and mild-mannered Mr. Himmel, the son of the Chief of Township Police, who carried always the mien of an Ethical Protestant.
Mister Maddison, who would later go on to write Coffee Shop Plays about desire and heartbreak, serenading the heart of an anonymous cooing maiden, loud in his Guffaw, and quick to discover contradictions, always liked to tease, and for whatever was contained within the bounds of his character, there was always plenty of Pop Corn and Soda Pop to unbind it. He studied with great care the distinctions of German Grammar, – with a sort of inclined virtue as that found in the attics of Rutgers’ Skull and Cap, brushing up on impressive facts, studying the canonical relevance of farting as a “ means to an end” , he visited Coffee Shops of a local variety, in the evenings of his commute overlooking the industrialized Schuylkill River, – a young man who guffawed, aged like Jacob before his time, ( or so the Bible says ), – he shifted uneasily between theology and autobiography.
My Gratitude, for he wrote mine ( autobiography ) on the Internet, in pencil, paper, pixel, and pen, with multiple cases of Pop Corn Provincialism and Nominative, Imaginative, Un-Grammatical Aphorisms, moved by the fantasies of a history major and blur of a jilted romance suburban poet, listening to Indie Tunes, he extolled his own examples after my borrowed name, and thunderstrokes of theological assertions, having scripted a few lines of autobiography, as my modest Self, he gained a poetic fame.
Kudos Mister Maddisson, for I Believe an Autobiography by any other name, would still be Just ( As ) Ben.
You can’t make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you’re doing is recording it. Art Buchwald .
. . .
On a Spring of 2008. Retrospections in Suburbia of East Coast. Alexander K. Rai honoring the ghosts of Eastern Seaboard Highschool in a Spirit of Gratitude Divine and a Feeling of the Light.
Honoring Reflections by References of others :
(1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69zybL7cSPA
(2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZbKHDPPrrc
(3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjftymU0bk
(4) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ciFTP_KRy4
(5) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxgZcMGmkkI
(6) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4WUsr689Y4
(7) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ZeXnmDZMQ
. . .
Alexander K. Rai, MSMA is Serial Entrepreneur and American Constitutionalist and a Fond Heart to Classical Traditions. He discovered at an early age, that Grace comes only buoyed by antagonism, as Light comes after braving darkness. The State of New Jersey conceded its defeat in a famous and record setting trial where Constitutional Principles browbeat State Corruption now no longer a Public Secret in 2009, – when Alexander K. Rai prevailed in a Famous Case against fraudulent and false indictment, setting new grounds for Liberty in the State of New Jersey. The Case was precipitated by antagonism Alexander found it a privilege to absorb with Faith from an oppressive, concrete, and xenophobic, anti-Values suburbia, that found Alexander’s aspirations to transform and guide his native Township towards true Self Appreciation and Empowerment through the Education and Benefit of the Gifted Youth and Green Economics and Classical Standards, “funny smelling and foreign”, subjecting the former to deprecations, witch-hunts, and an attempt to taxidermy and crucify a Striving and Justice Loving Individual, by those acquiscient to a sense of stolid privilege protected by “uncontested norms”. ‘MSMA’ stands for ‘Member to A Society of Mutual Admiration’, a Degree Alexander has bestowed on himself as well as others, Internationally, Reciprocally since he graduated from High School in early 2000′s. He has been listed in 2009 ‘Marquis’ Who’s Who in America’ and cited in Wall Street Journal ( for Non-Profit Works ), and has started numerous companies.
Additional References :
( 1 ) http://www.thesopranostate.com/
( 2 ) http://www.geniusdenied.com/
( 3 ) http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE56M3QU20090723
( 4 ) http://www.sparta.markoulakispublications.org.uk/index.php?id=77
( 5 ) http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/the_future_of_suburbia/
