![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F49179064-9392-4f9b-8462-7d3edaab5977_2016x1512.jpeg)
The creek is a little murky from recent rains. Okay, it’s a ditch really, like most creeks around here, meaning it’s been dredged out, straightened, or even created, by someone or something wielding a shovel. If you’re a bug on a leaf here, you might end up in the Gulf of Mexico without really deciding to. A lot of things happen without anyone deciding much, even big collective things.
As a fairly unborable farm kid, it was fun to consider how some little leaf was going to get to the Gulf. All of the little leaf roads lead to the Iroquois River around here, which enlarges the Kankakee then a few others on the way to the Mississippi, also murky, which leads to the Gulf, also murky, and metaphorical, clearly.
Just like in Rhettie’s life, and in Stu’s life, Beaver Creek (Ditch) was the first road for me to imagine taking to get to the Gulf. Actually, that’s where all of us little leaves would end up if we didn’t exercise our will. And actually, this requires educating our will, for best results. Some people, or some things, don’t want us to think about that, according to Stu, at least as Rhettie tells it.
It’s not all that important for today’s post, but some of you will remember that Bug Stu first appeared to me in the Land of Kent. Then he created a girl named Rhettie so he could appear in her dreams and so she could write this story, The Story of Stu, most generally speaking, not that there is only one story nor only one title. The first little book in the series, The Matches Studio and True Story of Stu, still needs some artwork done and some Purdue details added, but it should be done by mid-July now.
Rhettie is 33 this year, from the Class of 2009 at North Newton High School, and a few of my (girl) friends keep scolding me for referring to her, and them, as girls not women. I won’t digress here, but my custom is that any woman that I once knew as a girl, including former babysitters now in their seventies, are girls as well as women, and their male contemporaries are boys as well as men, or guys, so that’s almost everyone now. The digression is more interesting, but it would not, at least initially, help my case anymore than that explanation does.
I’ve mostly disassociated myself, therefore absolved myself, I’m thinking, from what is expressed in The Story of Stu series. Bug Stu comes to me, he creates Rhettie, she creates her version of him from her dreams, and I merely journal the interactions and reveal little slices of my own involvement here in this newsletter, or something.
Rhettie wrote the poem below. Many of the references, though, came alongside her thought-partner Wally, and from his dad David, and her Grandma Dorie, as they all dealt, and deal, with some songs and albums from 1974, from what could be called the serious side of the salacious and silly 70’s, as Dorie often puts it. Dorie, 84, is the most philosophical of the four, but our girl Rhettie is a close second.
Wally’s dad, David, lapped up all he could from the 70’s, when he was in his teens and 20’s, and he had continued perfecting his tomcatty ways along with his professional marketing skills into his 50’s. Then something hit him, hard, and persistently, somewhere in his cerebral cortex, and he became cursed with both a new insight about life and with cognitive decline, early onset dementia.
David’s decline has been gradual, so he’s had time to write quite a few notes about three albums that mean something very different to him now than they did in 1974. The three albums are ELO’s Eldorado, Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, and Supertramp’s Crime of the Century. All three are concept albums, as was common in the Prog Rock of those days.
Elton John however, wasn’t Prog Rock, but he was important in this story, and mine, and many other’s. He was on AM radio not FM so much, where the cooler things were. AM radio and top-forty songs sufficed when we were kids. Sure, most songs got old quickly, beaten into the ground and our heads through the ecosystem called Big Music. We didn’t have the lyrics very often, so we missed and mis-sang a lot.
The Carpenters were to easy to understand. Elton John was not. So when Elton released the song “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” in late 1973, we all had our various misinterpretations by January of 1974 when it went gold. We got the gist of it, involving saying goodbye to certain ideas of success, someone that should have stayed on the farm, and going back to one’s plow.
But “Back to the howling old owl in the woods, hunting the horny-back toad” was up for grabs, as was “let the dogs of society howl.” Wally’s dad, David, had interpreted it to suit his late teens philosophy, somewhat adorably, somewhat Self-Fulfillingly, as he calls it now. Who knows what all the different mis-hearings of those lyrics were.
“Let the dachshund decide on his Dao” made plenty of sense to David, using Dao for Way, appropriately and in keeping with language the girls found compelling, in all senses of the word, which David knew well of. Cuteness and contemplation combined. It rarely missed. Let the dogs of society howl, if they must, he thought then.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2962eb28-514c-40ce-a0a6-445fdaf907d2_1479x1465.png)
Anyway, last Thursday was D-Day, the 80th anniversary of the WWII Allied invasion. On Friday, I was sitting above the Teays River at The Pub and contemplating other D’s like deltas, daisies, Dao, dreams, etc. I was sitting ten feet from where this part of This Project began, with Lori D. then, listening to them play “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” in 2019.
I had a hundred important things on my mind on Friday, but Em and I only talked about fifty. And fifty reminds me of the Fifty Year Fit, which is society’s fight over clashing philosophies beginning around 1970 +/- (and “fifty” is just a rough number).
The Fray began a little before that, in 1964, as Rhettie and Wally have figured out, along with a bunch of other eerily orchestrated dates, including some relating to Purdue. Years that end in “4” seem especially important from Rhettie and Wally’s work.
The two have found all kinds of encouraging clues in music for both life and for turning back the Foes of Flourishing, the Stralfs, the boneless bastards as Stu calls them. In a different venue, I could explain the underlying and emergent symphony here. And if you’ve been reading along, maybe entangled by the lyrics and stories of the three albums I mentioned, appropriate for all ages and epochs, you wouldn’t really need that explanation, not that I wouldn’t still want to give it just one more time probably.
For now, the only thing I need to say is that the ending looks like a happy one for the countryside and the people in it, more than there are now, on getaways and gotaways, enabled by technology and science to thrive in spite of technology and science. It’s not as weird as it sounds. Nothing in this is weird, like I’ve always said. I mean, Purdue is deeply involved in this story, so how weird could it be?
We Didn’t Know, So Maybe…
Most want to work. We didn’t know.
The ads had told us wrong.
And maybe it’s careers we sought.
Or maybe all along…
Most want to learn. We didn’t know.
The TV told us wrong.
And maybe it’s degrees we sought.
Or maybe all along…
Maybe, after fifty years,
The Fit showed us the way
to miss what’s been in front of us,
the words they’d sing or say.
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
was a cry for deeper More,
Carpet Crawlers drawn beyond,
a force just some explore.
Eldorado in the mist,
but not the way we thought.
The gold not meant, the songs insist,
for something never bought.
The Crime the boneless bastards brought
since 1924…
or maybe even earlier,
ten years or maybe more.
The Crime of this last century,
of Ed Bernays and injury.
Relearn your lines, rehearse your plea,
send Angels from Montgomery.
A castle by the Wabash,
Gothic, built at our Purdue,
the students’ Union, young and old,
of life and what is True.
There’s more than meets the eye in life
and more than gold and oil,
more than gold and black in fact,
and hacks to foil and roil.
Oh, there it stands, Memorial,
of life and loss and pain,
a hundred years of wholeness
in the edifice, not in vain.
Purposeful in Purpose first
and pondering the ways
reductionists can never win
or aid the Markets’ slaves.
“Give them what they think they want,”
George Ade was known to say.
It was a jest and clearly meant
to speak against The Fray.
The Fray would start in forty years
from Ross-Ade’s opening day,
thirty-nine to fire the shot,
the next year come what may.
Forty years of wilderness
The Fog of War would say,
by McNamara, wiser now,
on how wars make their way.
American Dreams,
no hems, no seams,
just love of lust and greed.
Give the people what they think…
they want. A crime indeed.
The crime’s not in the wanting,
and it’s hard to say what’s “Wrong,”
and maybe it’s just More we sought,
but maybe all along…
the More we sought was lavender
in fields with other flowers.
and maybe we knew more of life
than money’s/markets’ powers.
The Crime of Eldorado
was mistaken for a Lamb,
a way of peace and thriving
with the Dao and the I AM.
A century gone and yet to come,
the castle tower looks east.
It sees across the Wabash
the Star City’s most and least.
It sees the Fort Ouiatenon,
a muddled “White man’s past.”
The French and English had their wars
for lands that wouldn’t last.
And Prophetstown, they’d burn it down
and call it victory.
The past belongs behind us
—but a useful memory.
From Williamsport to Battle Ground
to Kentland in the north,
the three small towns that form a tree,
a Christmas tree of sorts.
Or maybe it’s a pie piece.
Either way the shape means change,
a delta, long and boldly drawn,
with fates to rearrange.
But if it is a Christmas tree,
Purdue feeds the tree stand,
with waters deep from down below
for head and heart and hand.
A Bright Spot shows atop the tree,
the first, of the first Ade’s,
a glow that some say, “Couldn’t be…
a black dot only fades.”
Or so they said, some time ago,
but maybe they were wrong.
We’ve fought for Eldorado,
but then maybe all along…
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff3178727-c89a-4a4b-9bc0-a123b06121da_3500x3500.png)