"What you get married for if you don’t want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight.
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night."
TS Eliot, The Wasteland
Joaquin Brubeck(d 2025) and Jim Boone.
That Joaquin Brubeck, I sought to meet him after his death, to attend whatever sending-off their was, in my own confusion, ascending to mark only the dignity of life and not much else particularly: not of feeling, nor any acknowledgement of merit, not even to push him out of existence.
I would be surprised to learn he had living family: t'were other Brubecks.
I was approached by Joaquin Brubeck, one in failing health, in reference to acting as arbiter in his former friendship with one Jim Boone, whom many recognize as a favorite of this writer.
In ways checked upon pride, their own unwavering pride, they stood off, and in the river of time, they had re-oriented facing away from each other.
In ways checked upon familiarity and custom, Brubeck broke the lines first and sought his former boy, the lesser of the group, our one Jim Boone. And a desperation there was, to restore his collegial insult-shoots with Boone, but only to the extent the issues were 50/50, giving himself a handicap of having the better fashion sense of the two men, conceding only as far as reaching out first.
It was a false truce ungranted between the two men, as Brubeck supposed intermediary and correspondent was recited context from the perspective of Brubeck:
Partially it was that he immediate a Mongol Horde tendency, his rugged pursuit of what he thought was the best in life, in his own sense of balance. Foreign pliable women, piquant in beauty but with a desperation that indebted them, spoke to his sense of pride as a deliverer, and his pride in ownership. Foreign cars, but cheaply so though great in pretense, great in hubris: his Social Security version of the Mercedes, the BMW, the rat, the cat, and the dog.
At last there was a mystical message of spiritual fatigue.
What he imputed into the universe, appetites: his two Hyundai, a Philipina who got clear of him in reclaiming her freedom, and a litany of drunken ramblings.
His insistent appetite for what he thought was the best.
When his rope splayed during the week of the fourteenth, they found him alone, in a house he owned and inhabited alone despite his awful health.
In his titanic assail of fatigue, he at long last slept: mongrel sought the cave, mongrel sought the cave.
"Blessed are the sleepy, for they soon drop off."
-Friedrich Nietzche.
"The young lady changed the position of one of the vases and went back to the two young men. They began to talk of the same subject. Once or twice the young lady glanced at me over her shoulder.
I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem the more real. Then I turned away slowly and walked down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my pocket. I heard a voice call from one end of the gallery that the light was out. The upper part of the hall was now completely dark.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."
James Joyce, "Araby"
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