THE BRASSO GHOST
Thanks to yesterday’s interesting young lady inviting me and four others into her well-seasoned engine room complex, a hub of engineering contained within the depths of the moored ‘My Friend’ ship, yes, thanks to her, a ghost story was prompted in me today. I’ve long been an admirer of Warhol, although most people laugh at me, but when I saw seemingly endless rows of Brasso canisters lined up in the engine room, one of which was upside down, I knew I had been right all along about my artistic tastes, if not my penchant for blank stories that were often encouraged by listening to John Cage music as a quelling of the chitter chatter around me! Even ghosts need their social interaction and the letting off of steam by mere exchanged gossip or, more emotionally, heartfelt explanations about their individual lives. And, looking around me, the green pistons and items of other heavy-duty leverage, too, seemed to mutter things to each other silently. The story told to us by the young lady involved an engine-room man whose obsession was such Brasso elbow grease, until some joker turned a single canister of it upside down amidst a neat row of them and the assiduous man literally died of a broken symmetry from the breakdown of the rules that his OCD dictated…. unless I got the story wrong. Whatever the case, the brass plaque to his memory in the engine room remains highly polished day in and day out without anyone now polishing it! And that’s where I assumed a ghost must be at play, and if not the Brasso man’s ghost it was the ghost of sound that emanated as seeming music from the huge red funnels on the ship’s decks as aided and abetted by the old Dansette record players and Bakelite wirelesses and tireless reel-to-reels that peppered the place from the top deck’s wheel house to the very engine room where I forged future memories for my own ghost story today. A steerage in frissons with spooks as well as spanners in the pipelines. A ghost that wandered the ether with sapphire styluses and tapes that jingle-jangled to the clatter of ancient tambourine men. It was there, in the ether, I eventually met the Brasso man face to face, and he smiled at my reference to pop art for the pirate pop ship that is our planet. And I smiled back at my new-found friend. I told him, as part of our emotional small-talk, that I had — unnoticed by the young lady and my four companions — turned the upside down canister the right way up.
(Written today)
Thanks to yesterday’s interesting young lady inviting me and four others into her well-seasoned engine room complex, a hub of engineering contained within the depths of the moored ‘My Friend’ ship, yes, thanks to her, a ghost story was prompted in me today. I’ve long been an admirer of Warhol, although most people laugh at me, but when I saw seemingly endless rows of Brasso canisters lined up in the engine room, one of which was upside down, I knew I had been right all along about my artistic tastes, if not my penchant for blank stories that were often encouraged by listening to John Cage music as a quelling of the chitter chatter around me! Even ghosts need their social interaction and the letting off of steam by mere exchanged gossip or, more emotionally, heartfelt explanations about their individual lives. And, looking around me, the green pistons and items of other heavy-duty leverage, too, seemed to mutter things to each other silently. The story told to us by the young lady involved an engine-room man whose obsession was such Brasso elbow grease, until some joker turned a single canister of it upside down amidst a neat row of them and the assiduous man literally died of a broken symmetry from the breakdown of the rules that his OCD dictated…. unless I got the story wrong. Whatever the case, the brass plaque to his memory in the engine room remains highly polished day in and day out without anyone now polishing it! And that’s where I assumed a ghost must be at play, and if not the Brasso man’s ghost it was the ghost of sound that emanated as seeming music from the huge red funnels on the ship’s decks as aided and abetted by the old Dansette record players and Bakelite wirelesses and tireless reel-to-reels that peppered the place from the top deck’s wheel house to the very engine room where I forged future memories for my own ghost story today. A steerage in frissons with spooks as well as spanners in the pipelines. A ghost that wandered the ether with sapphire styluses and tapes that jingle-jangled to the clatter of ancient tambourine men. It was there, in the ether, I eventually met the Brasso man face to face, and he smiled at my reference to pop art for the pirate pop ship that is our planet. And I smiled back at my new-found friend. I told him, as part of our emotional small-talk, that I had — unnoticed by the young lady and my four companions — turned the upside down canister the right way up.
(Written today)