Casey Stengel chewed through the Popol Vuh like Red Man tobacco, as if its Rosetta Stone would unlock the mysteries of the Mets batting order, but the problem was insoluble, even for Methusalah, even with the glove of Ed Kranepool, yet we all looked for solutions in those days, so we could continue in our ways of whine and poses: That we had to pretend every heart was not estranged and that what was called beautiful was more than pain, that resentment was only hunger, mass unconsciousness comfort and almost identical the same as individual, that annihilation did not hang like grapes over the most well-lit streets. It was all somehow the fault of the Greeks, who hurled the first thunderbolt of mind to level cities clean, creating centuries of pain and central plumbing and a whole lot of forgetting of everything that wasn't hell and especially of our complicity in our own slavery, as we dreamed, like horses, we were free and that we only chose compassion for our captors in the belief we would become them, having forsaken the carrot of knowledge for the stick of De Sade the Teacher, having made peace with the insidious beast of carnal desire for commodities, having settled for the drums that were taken from the chattel and strangely given to the outsiders whose gimcrack smack and fellaheen benzedrine made some want to crawl through the minor 9ths of derangement's fun house mirror cracks, but it was as treacherous as ever on the outskirts of the sublime what with talk and liquor never near cheap enough and Buckley hoovering up any holiness like the arch gay Jesus wannabe he was paid by the CIA to be, quoting from the scriptures of golden freemasonry, never disclosing that Tiki martinis and the Playboy Philosophy would be the keys to a new and distant day.
