'I've Always Depended on the Kindness of Strangers'

II

Dateline. – Smithville, KY 7.16.2026

Quite a night in Paducah. More on that later. This is the last fragment which transitions to the straight reportage segment of the trip, having digested the rip. I haven't read Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner probably in 25-30 years, which is a shame. But, I experienced some things yesterday and this morning that give me the shivers and reminded me of them and Southern Gothic.

Just the agony and desparation of the Southland, hidden behind a veneer of politeness and gentility. This is what happens when you hit the right dive bar and its homeless drinkers, who just looked like regular people, but there were 3 homeless people, a young musician and an emphatic ex-con. Oh, and a Delta Force guy-attorney built homeless raver who spent the night on the couch of my Harrah's Casino riverside hotel room. Last name Schultz, of course. Like I said, more on that later.

But getting back to the wages of sexualized alienation as represented by Blanche DuBois. I'm surmizing it based on my own relatively chaste experience, but among the things touched on here is mistaking sex for love, desire for truth, feeling for reality, egotism for affection, vanity for self-actualization. Other things are better left ommitted.

Her experience in the play and the film is in it's own right heart-rending. We're adopting it more as a metaphor, for the kindness of strangers, who immediately scan suffering and act accordingly. City people have lost this capability, if they ever had it in the first place (they didn't and they don't, by in large).

There's too little natural in them. I'll bet fewer of them realize that animals sense suffering in people. Cats are always friendlier when I'm sad, for instance.

Back in CA, city people would say with scarcely concealed incredulity: well, who are you going with? This suggestion I found laughable: that's the joke, I mean, the point. To get away from this hyper-cool thing that happens all day every day outside of the Tenderloin. Country. Solitude. Even when you're happy. It is essential, to me, anyway.

[I erased most of this, but left in a few vaguely pertinet paragraphs]

Took a couple urbanites for an outing to Port Costa, others to Locke. Their boredom shone through, despite their best efforts at concealment, which were unsubtle, at best. They liked it fine, probably. Never brought it up again, might not have said thank you, either. So, fine, spend all your time in a diverse monoculture. And do share your contempt for ordinary rural people, liberally.

III

On three occasions now, various and sundry traumas were imposed on me – and granted, it's my fault for feeling and caring – nobody made me feel any hurt. Some people like to wallow. Others wallow 'n learn. So, again, I skeedaddled away into the dark following dotted hypnotic lines. Some consistency in a screwed up kaleidescope of parental pretense and the artifice of 'concern'.

Rural people will come right out and tell you the truth: We're gonna tie one on or get tore up and chase the girls a little. City people have designs on designer experiences and special things like exclusive speakeasies – just abject horseshit – and they're too busy 'processing' their post-modern banality.

They not in the right 'space' or was it 'place'. They're incessantly and insistently on a 'journey' to nowhere. They regurgitate psychobabble and the latest trends, soon to be disposed of for woo or woo hoo.

It's funny, I try to elicit remarks from yokals pertaining to city people and the most common response is non-verbal – a slight glare at bringing those people up at all, or a roll of the eye, like they see through my pretense, which they likely do.

Some fond remarks up in Jackson, CA from bartendresses and servers come to mind. They despise SF & LA people. And why not? These urban explorers are incapable of shielding their servants from their oozing contempt.

My mother is the same way, demeaning the profession of a woman who tried to tell her what her husband is. In the same way that Vegas serves flyover country dealership owners, so to do the rustic spaces of the Sierra foothills serve as a footstool for urban stool. You can't tell some people anything that differs from their preconceived notions of 'bi-winning: winning here & winning there'.

These are stereotypes, naturally, but in the same way that 4,000 years of ruthless matriarchy would begin to settle the score, so too do we need a peasant revolution to roust the sophisticates from their cushy lairs and decadent nests. Pol Pot had the right idea, he just ki

[Herr Klamm Industries does not, in fact, endorse the ruthless extirpation of the bourgoisie element, based solely on whether or not people wear glasses]

Just try and feign to hide your vomitous contempt for the people serving you. Is that too much to ask? I've been this gross person, albeit a lighter form because I am country. I've just decided to embrace it, by default.

Plodding notions like kindness, being normal and natural, friendly and so on and so forth? Well these traits are seen as backward or traditional. That they are the fundaments of civilization goes lost on the civilised.

Do I hate city people? Not really. They just think their bullshit is aromatic. Rural people are upfront that they're full of shit, which is refreshing. Keep forgetting the actual point of this.

IV

What I meant to say was: show up in most any small town in this country with an open heart and you will invariably be treated with kindness and respect. I've experienced it in West Virgina, Ohio, Indiana and now Illinois. This is where partisanship or political orientation is a mirage.

Right wing small town people are simply much nicer than left wing big city people. Period point blank. Granted, I'm a sharp-dressed man now whose age is frequently underestimated by a decade+, so I look the part without being too fancy. And I know how to come off humble, because I still look like preppyish – that is but the merest of my Mephistopheles Arts.

Why? Because their lives are slower. They have a minute and take it to pay attention. They don't have 500 or 1,000 contacts. They have a dozen or so meat puppets that they know pretty darn well, warts and all. So when some bourgie-looking half dead duck with good manners stumbles into town and tries simple friendliness and familiarity – and listens more than he talks – they're pleasantly surprised.

City people are buttoned up. They are on the lookout for impending threats. Most are quite clear on their relative superiority. And it shows, even if they're too deluded to know it. And the more degrees you possess, generally the worse you are.

By this third go round I knew that Appalachia was the place for me to recover. Always wanted to visit the Ohio Valley anyhow. Perhaps it was a random accident, but I doubt it. Give me a right wing 'simpleton' over a left wing 'sophisticate' all day every day (and twice on Sunday) when it comes to a shoulder to cry on. And the tears aren't just one way either.

Do you know why rural people don't ponder 'authenticity'? Because they've got it already. They don't need to cultivate what comes naturally. It's just really laughable, how the sharp contrast.

One closing anecdote. One of my favorite Tenderloin dives had a Korean woman named Susan. She would bring a friend kimchee – he was more devoted to the bottle than I, but she liked me ok. A couple of times I'd go in there and she'd be plotzed with her head on the counter, basically passed out. The response. 'Bitch is drunk again'. Ok. They wanted their medicine and the bitch was drunk again. Unfair.

One more closing anecdote. So I go into this bar by the river in McConnellsville, OH just north of West Virginia yesterday. 'The River Queen' on the banks of the muddy Muskingum River. Still a little raw, so I put my face in my hands and lightly heaved a couple times. I'd finished half a beer before smoking again for the first time in 13 years. When I returned I was no doubt glumly traipsing into an empty bar at 4PM. My bottle had vanished.

Now, maybe the bartendress didn't want a gloomy Gus around killing the ambiance. Or another fucked up out of towner on safari. But I understood that as an act of deep compassion. And when I asked others around here about it, young and old – I canvassed the place, qualitative research, mind you – the response I got was a nonchalant: 'we look after people around here'.

That four teenagers in suburban Louisville Kentucky created post-rock in 1990, creating a new genre evidently, continues to inspire me to this day. It is my favorite rock record. Second place is a non-entity by comparison, to me. I've learned a great deal from it on this trip, because perhaps these are things that I already knew but had forgotten. The light & dark ambiance of it is Unheimlich.