Dinners and nightmares...

You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he's done.

Richard Hugo, Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

I'm picturing Wall Street today as looking like this pix I found. I think it would be great if it did, if all the traders, hedgers, and short-sellers just had it out, went apeshit on each other. Be helpful in getting rid of all that money-fear.

During a different time, my own forays onto Wall Street made me wonder deeply about humankind. I always landed there around 5 PM, and always seemed to be facing a solid wall of tramping people staring ahead blankly, into some psychic middle ground. If I tripped and fell in front of that advancing horde, I knew I'd wind up a flattened corpse, entirely covered with shoe-prints.

I was first in NYC during a crack in time, between the Beats and the hippies. It was a pretty good time, although we little bohemians didn't have a label for ourselves. We were all artists of some type or other, seeking each other out in the East Village, hanging out in Washington Square, just glad to be together like puppies in a heap.

The title of my post, Dinners and nightmares is the name of a book I happened on that year, by Diane diPrima. She was writing poetry when, outside of some brittle academic types, not too many women were letting it rip. The poems in Dinners are pretty hilarious, describing the kinds of meals you make when you're down to oatmeal, an onion, and maybe a crusty can of tomato sauce and you're not a Nothin-Says-Lovin-Like-Somethin-From-The-Oven gal to begin with. She writes about her innumerable guys, relationships about fifteen minutes long, and casual good/bad/let-it-go sex, with enormous ease about herself. It's a good portrait of life in edge city, which was where most artists lived back then. A time when, as Dylan noted, he once got paid for a gig with a chess piece.

I think a lot of us are going to be rediscovering edge city, and it's not too bad. Hard to believe now, but many of us grew up not expecting to make much money and not caring that we didn't. Voluntary poverty, Michael Harrington called it, in The Other America. What little glittery treasures were we after if not gelt? Raw experience, was one, going to a place few middle-class anglos went to, and so some of us took off for Kathmandu. Another was mouthing off in our liberal mags, often published in someone's apartment, or starting another liberal mag to mouth off in. And some of us were just what we were, like Diane.

Anyway, now that the Golden Calf is melting down, it's going to be innaresting to see what folks will find to do instead. Just putting it out there, but may I suggest attempting the unknown? The artful? Or the heroic?

It sure beats cruising some big box store for a case of macaroni and cheese.

As my wise husband sometimes says, There are higher ways to be.

And I say, hell to the yes. You bet there are.