Speaker 1: Some days I glance at the front page and see
the name Rump in three or four places, So I
flip back to the lifestyle section, maybe read a wine review.
Fresh and vivations with chewy tannins and bursts of flowers
and fruits. The deranged man with cognitive problems is a
passing phenomenon, but bursts of flowers and fruits have been
with us forever, and even in the winter. Here in
Manhattan one can find shops to walk into and feel
flowers bursting around you, and markets where you inhale the
freshness of mounds of apples and pears and oranges. The
old King who goes mad is a character out of Shakespeare.
He has no place in America. You walk out of
a performance of King Leir and by a bouquet of
tulips and a bag of apples, and your back to reality.
When van Go admitted himself to the Asylum for the
Insane at Saint Remi de Provence, he spent the last
years of his life painting the gardens and woods, the
trees and flowers, paintings that were the finest of his life.
He could have been destructive, set fires, broken windows, preyed
on the weak and helpless, but he did not. He
found solace in painting. This is the difference between an
artist and a creep. I am not insane, insensitive, yes,
perhaps maybe slightly autistic, lacking in social skills due to
my sanctified upbringing that taught me to shun onbelievers. But
I found ways to work around this and to engage
with people, starting with my discovery of the limerick. Other
kids were writing haiku like the Blackbird descends overhead in
the darkness and shrieks at the Moon, which I didn't
understand compared to the simple construction of a five line limerick.
I do not like camping at all, not winter, spring, summer,
or fall. I hate snakes and owls, and I can't
move my bowels except in a warm toilet stall. It
isn't Van Goes the Starry Night or is painting irises,
but it makes people laugh or at least smile, and
it is easily replicated. You don't need to go to
New York or LA to see it. From the limerick.
I worked my way up to writing essays and stories,
and eventually wound up on a stage with a microphone
and there, Thank the Lord I was able to be
the warm, friendly, good humored soul. I found it hard
to be in real life. As a writer, you spend
a good deal of time looking at the wall, or
you lie on the floor and gaze at the ceiling,
neither of which is conducive to becoming a charming person.
But as I have proved, one can work around one's
deficientgencies to achieve adequacy. My life has been a series
of trips on sinking ships. I went to high school
and college before there were cell phones, when students looked
at the teacher and took notes in Longhand I grew
up among the sanctified brethren, who were so devoted to
God's word they sat through two hour Bible study sessions
with a brief hymn singing intermission, and I sat in
their midst and surreptitiously wrote limericks. Our Savior, the Lord
Jesus Christ was for our sins sacrificed, was raised from
the dead to become living bread ever fresh, whole wheat
and unsliced. I wrote for my hometown paper when it
was set in hot lead on a line of type
typesetter by a printer named Yentz, smoking a lucky cigarette
and drinking coffee laced with bourbon, and the paper was
printed on a flatbed press that was inked with rollers
and delivered fresh to people's doorsteps by boys on bicycles,
which now is ancient history, along with the Aztecs and
the passenger pigeon and magnetic recording tape. I necked with
a girl in the front seat of a car when
the front seat was a bench seat and the gearshift
was on the steering wheel before it was installed between
the two bucket seats, and made necking awkward at best,
so that the front seat couple had to listen to
the cries of pleasure from the back seat couple, who
went on to a happy marriage. The front seaters lacked
the social skills needed to establish satisfying relationships, but people
still go to theaters and clubs to see a person
stand at a microphone and try to amuse them, and
as long as they do, I am prepared to be
that person. I do not talk about mad Kings in
my performance. I am not a psychiatrist, and I found
king Lear boring when I was forced to read it
in college. King Lear died, and I say good riddance.