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Resounding Andy:
July 6, 2005
[Today is the day of my late cousin Andy's remembering in Austin, and I couldn't think of a better way to celebrate his life than showing you how much he celebrated it himself. He sent me the following letter exactly 13 months ago today.]
Gene,
Your outlandish twists have inspired me. I trudge to work as a high rollin buss boy at an anonymous, yet popular NYC restaurant riding the large silver cell transit vehicles through the viscera pathways that deliver us humans to our proper residences and contribution points. We are the fractions and small puzzle pieces of the greater mind and identity that is NY city, all that inhabit and ride the trains and cars and walk the sidewalks seem to make up the consciousness of the city with our many consciences and contributions. I have traveled to a great human synapse, where organic is the totally man made and trees can serve only as the artificial reminders of a foreign naturalness that is far away from here, different than as a distance measured in miles, but a distance measured in the density of thought and it all would not be possible if it were not supported by the small town nowheres and medium size metropolises that are the channels to which all economies and personalities flow through in order to create the energy to support this structure where they seem to terminate in a large churning spectacle of total human orgasm, and we try every day to clean it up. A human brain could be said to occupy a few square inches or a universe of endless thought and in this way the city can be measured by boundaries in miles but never in depth of impact...measured, yet immeasurable. We travel clad in the suits of our identity to our pockets and places within the large mass of earth tissue, nikes, cheap fifth avenue suits, or ghetto jungle outfits, some with blaring headphones to dampen the uncontrolled fractals of their own thoughts spinning ever outward with no interpretable meaning. We serve as the space between the peak and troughs of a bell curve simply to support the extremes broadcast to us through the metrobrain airwaves and at the speed of light on fiber optic cables drilled and laid in rock tissue networked to eventually reach our own brains and sensory mechanisms and to produce sex thoughts, love, depression, addiction, hate, lust, and even to affect the biological rhythms of your body on down to the consistency of this mornings unsatisfying terd in the pot. I am constantly affected in this place and there is no how or why to it, noway of truly guaging the impact of annything on my life is there? Blank faces on the train and an occasional breif connection through a glance or a word cannot be calibrated. So we sit in the silver box, surrounded by brown fake wood paneling, with chrome polls to hold onto, on orange and yellow seats that conjure up images of mcdonalds furniture and the architecture of an indoor playscape and ride ride ride to an eventual demise. We sit still and orderly, feeling each other riding the subway, sometimes trying to telepathically interpret the thoughts of others, sometimes knowing them. Together we inhabit the city, as daddylonglegs huddled together in a mass on the side of a cave vibrating together for some purpose unknown to us, but natural. I have reached the apex and now reside in the harry daddylongled armpit looking formation that is New York City. I ride the subway accompanied by the ramblings of william s burroughs' naked lunch and your writings tickle my fancy as they swirl arround in my thoughts along with thoughts of mugwamps and interzone. And I agree with you, there's inly one thing to do, tear it all down here together in an alcohol induced frenzy along with some spiritual recognition. I look forward to more letters and some time together here our bridges have not been burned but are still being built.
Love always,
your cousin Andy
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My condolences and thanks for the post. Wonderful letter evoking resurrections of spontaneous prose and thinking. Thinking long lost, or at least somewhat rare. But I digress. Thanks
- Neil / July 7, 2005 10:59 AM
Hi Gene,
I finally found your site, it's beautiful, your poetry. I am glad that you shared this beautiful letter from Andy with everyone, I miss him every day, but I am sure he always knew something we didn't about what it all means, and I think he's doing fine, where ever he is now, which is everywhere, the perfect traveller, and fast too. I don't know if you will ever see this, but it's almost Christmas, and half a year has passed since this happened, it's hard to believe, but you have to believe in life because it's a gift to be explored to the last microsecond, the mystery continues and lures us into a new day every morning.
xx
- aunt pauli / December 23, 2005 12:34 AM
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