Sidewalks Speak Dutch

Sidewalks can speak plain, even after landmark legislation of the mid 70’s, the so-called “Pooper Scooper” laws.

Sidewalks can speak concretely.

With or without rebar.

“We’re in all this muck”, spoke a colleague of Henry Hudson, this particular colleague an intrepid explorer, a recalcitrant and stubborn thinker, and a journalist, diarist, scribbler, scrivener, scribe, rubricator, illuminator, stay-at-home daddy, schmuck.

Poet schmuck. Schmuck poet. Schmuck poet of the muck.

At around this time, in China, there was no China. There was a People’s Republic of China, not the same thing as “China”, any more than Russia was equivalent to the “USSR”. This was long before there were sidewalks in Peking, Beijing, or any variant, according to Hanyu Pinyin, maybe. Through much of China’s history, including in Tibet and Mongolia, was a roiling moil and smoke screen, or at least a smoke, sidewalks screened muck, at that precise date when China, picking up on opium dens, also heard, concretely, mystically, materialistically, the doctrines, dogmas, apostasy, unorthodox, heterodox, hysterical, ring of fire pacific rim job heretic wisdom, of Marx and Lenin.

The Chinee, then in a kind of blanket, unquestioning, uncritical heterodox wisdom, and remembering NYC, Mannahattas, King Kong atop the Empire State Building, and sidewalks. Sidewalks of New York. East Side, West Side, all around the town. Sidewalk and sidewinder rattling…

So, then, as a kind of restless search for taking the good while leaving the bad, in Beijing there were to be found, cool in the winter– cool in the summer, too, in a different sense– where you could fry an egg on the sidewalk, should you so choose, sidewalks. These were sidewalks of Mannahattas– unbelievable.

Muck is a Yiddish word.