The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity; and it was not meant that we should voyage far. –H.P. Lovecraft
Fat Kid Wednesdays lay waste to Paris.
Compass points, roads, and maps work fine for mundane travel but invariably prove useless for intrepid souls bent on exploring America’s many transdimensional gateways and pocket universes. Even the most potent combination of trial-and-error, word-of-mouth, reading between lines, and seeing between cracks does little to augment the mechanisms driving our usual guides: chance, chaos, and intuition. (I stand with 1927 Nobel winner Henri Bergson in maintaining that, like intellect and will, the last is a legitimate faculty, )
They’re better now.
And then there’s luck, or more precisely, the grand old Middle English equivalent: “haps.” For years, Fat Kid Wednesdays have held down a Monday night residency at the Clown Lounge. And for years—as in “more than five”—bassist Adam Linz has graced my inbox with timely info on the night. I’m exceedingly fond of the band. I’ve written about them. I own Singles and The Art of Cherry.
Speaking of transdimensional gateways…
Why then, did I wait until Monday before last to finally take the plunge? Every long-lived enterprise needs newbies all the time, to fill in for the inevitable dropouts, move-aways, and bandwagon-jumpers till the early adapters start bringing their kids. If nothing else, I make a dashing relief player, with great tipping and artist appreciation skills.
Too many reinforcements spoil the plot. Don’t let this happen to you.
Or maybe it’s taken me all these years to accumulate enough haps for the journey, to earn the knowledge that the quickest route out of Saint Paul leads down the stairs to the left of the Turf Club‘s entrance, past the ancient, smoked glass panel that may or may not hide something on one side from something on the other, past the landing where darkness and the tattered remnants of old conversations swirl like dead leaves—especially past the tiny foyer with the unsettling geometry where hardly anybody lingers for more than a few minutes. (Simply glancing at one of its angles can permanently turn a sensitive individual into H.P. Lovecraft minus the language skills.)
One wrong turn in the Turf Club’s basement and you could end up like poor Henry Anthony Wilcox.
By the time I enter the Clown Lounge proper, a goodly chunk of my topside personality is gone, torn away by whatever unseen forces maintain the wormhole I’ve just passed through. As with most forays into quantum reality , I don’t notice a thing at first. Neither does my traveling companion—Villanova—who generally fares better on the other side of one or more looking-glasses than in mundane reality. At least she doesn’t say anything. But Villanova’s not a talker. (To be continued.)
Goodness!
