30.12.08





The Next Time I See You, Satan, I'm Going to Beat You Up!
Coming down the mountain, moving south, out of Oregon and into the Jefferson valley, I could see the clouds, wrung out by the winds, streaming across the top of Mount Shasta, a white-capped behemoth overlooking the region like a Himalayan monarch. Most mountains do. They have that quality. They are monarchical. They press against the sky and there’s no telling them anything. They are in charge. We wait on them. They are never pleased. Like the wind, they own the land, forcing their will upon all inhabitants. And so on this day, seabirds, white gulls of some kind (I wish I knew what kind), were oddly trouncing around, sifting for food at the road side rest site, placed like a dish of rest at the mountain’s valley table. They seemed lost, as if the wind had blown them there from far away. I asked the rest site attendants, one was clearly retarded and the other one, a Latino) if it was unusual for these birds to be there. The retarded one mumbled something that was lost in the 50 mph winds. The Latino said the white gulls always come in the summer. I thanked them and then walked away, then realized: It was March.
The point of this passage was to get out of the rain. And just this once, the sun burst through the clouds and painted this valley in a way valleys are supposed to be painted by the sun. Great broad clean sweeps of color. At this rest stop along U.S. 5, I got out to take a piss and a picture.
The wind was blowing hard, damn hard. I’d been driving for six hours at least, after leaving Canyonville, Oregon earlier that morning (a nice little place that I eventually found a little disturbing, due to its bible belt undercurrent that packed its more hermetic charms in tight, its health food store, its cyber cafe, its large white masons hall, all tucked in tight in a womb of paternal Jehovah protectionism) and was about ready to go postal about the weather. Really had had enough.
Six miserable months the storms, my sweeties, rendered me into complete unreliable narrator-hood. Now, after facing numerable challenges to my sanity as I have re-traced our steps to this dream of a life at the far end of our continent, I have been reduced to madly running through the Mohave desert in the cold and dark in order to find a fucking telephone so that I could hear her voice and know it’s going to be OK. But such assurances have escaped me. Instead, after facing yet another horrible Olympus on the road up and down the pass in Tehachapi, California, where I determined the most deadly foe to man isn’t the horror of nature, but instead, the nature of the California drivers who hurl through the world on some kind of high-octane hell without a care in the world for who they run off the road, I descended into yet another underworld to find I’m not worthy of this mission.
Now, as I face this cracked mirror in a motel room in Barstow, another place being cold-blasted by the hideous wind, I am tortured by a lingering premonition. A previous night’s dream at Sis’s place in Sacramento included, in the crash of iron and mix of metal, the literal sound of her crying that exists only in my head, the sound of the word “OK,” as I imagined maybe you too were succumbing to the same maddening drought of sunlight as we keep moving south, further south, only to find the sun has seemed to have flown forever from view. I turned on the television only briefly in this pitiful motel room to find the planet beset by volcanoes and cyclones and endless war, as well as a nation preoccupied with meaningless trivial little follies like basketball playoffs and “reality” series carnivals. I tried to call anyone I could but it was too late at night. The loneliness of the road had undone me. I scrambled to find some solution to this emptiness I felt, this gut-wrenching doubt about what, if anything, we were to become.
And worse, a cracked mirror reveals the face of a man reduced to complete narcissism and treachery beyond even what he knew he was capable. It began in Canyonville, I believe, when the cyber cafe lady said my work was too irreligious to even be considered marketable commodity in their town. At first, I rejoiced. At first, I rested in the anarchist artist’s glee that comes from provoking such a strong reaction. Then this obsession of mine to be a bard the whole world. This outright pathetic craving to be heard and understood was bolstered by a positive response in Ashland, land of a bards, a pretty, perfect land of Cathar glee, where poets, playwrights and other bards can be celebrated and congratulated and adored, safe and free to think and blather amongst themselves. I had an audience behind a coffeehouse during a short break from the road where I could be the man I imagine myself to be: The sage, the poet, the mystic, the raky rascal on the road. Oh god, how I get so like this when I'm out there ...
Then I was off again to face more storms. I tried and tried again to find some lightness in me, you know ... the humor in all this ... I have come one thousand miles in two days of driving. During that time, I have seen the sun maybe three times, maybe for an hour or two, tops. Meanwhile, the earth is breaking open. The birds are either sick or lost. Volcanoes across the world are pouring black coal into the sky. This will only increase the greenhouse effect. A cyclone the size of a continent is tormenting the other side of the world, and here, on the Pacific Coast, the big hand of God is slapping America across the face with a cold, wet fist. And I, under this fist, can only marvel but cannot laugh. I cannot find the lightness necessary to carry any reader.
Raja, our dog, is saying nothing. Just like the rest of us, he has no answers. He is sent away with me as some kind of substitute for love, I suppose, and I answered the bell the night before this one by cradling him in a blanket as he shook in the cold on the porch of the white-picket fence home of Sis of Sacramento. He responded by refusing his food and obviously entreating me to find our way back to her. But I have nothing now but the fear all is lost, that something has gone hideously wrong with all of our plans, that it’s all my fault, due to my frailties and pointless yearnings, my hunger, my shame, my ceaseless clutching for some kind of answer to the internal and external system of demise pr entropy of all living things.
I have this bottomless fear that when I last looked at her, the wolf woman goddess in the rear view mirror, I had seen her for the last time. That you would realize, as we began to retrace our steps, too, we have akk faced the rain-swept valleys and snow-capped monarchs, as you searched your memory banks and found new reasons to doubt; reasons to love, to pass the miles ... going forward, but with a big question mark on yer head ...

~

First, it starts out with her leaning into a storm. Saying something about some ancient mythic devil rising from the sea. She is dancing wildly, in a dervish ... singing some wild name, the wind kicking 50 at least, the storms of America lashing into the shore ... We are still back on the Oregon Coast, then, with her Cappy sister priestess, who is also facing her own demons under these daunting conditions, and we have all come undone and grown tired from the move, come undone together and gone wildly into some other more suitable direction. Like Portland. Or Canada. Or maybe we could have just stayed put and even as I write this have remained hunkered down in our sad empty sleepiness owl’s nest of a house on the Oregon Coast, fighting off the golem and gargoyles of the Chinook winds with bouts of beer and bible beating. With Reiki on the run. With wild-eyed goddess energy that knows better than to find anything decent enough to grasp onto when it comes to the flighty love of a mere mortal man. I imagine two queens who have basically decided to rule the waves and currents of the collapsing world on their own, leaving me to listen to trains in the night, to wait for the daylight to pull myself together in order to carry all of this crap, this boatload of property, this totem dance of overwhelming memories, these dirty clothes and dog-barfed blankets, all of this material scarred earthenware, this skeletal shell of consumable us, to my own private, personal, sex-crazed, ego-driven kingdom hall of hell.
Now, in this black desert of the night, I have this ten by ten cell as a shelter from the chaos outside, but nothing to soothe me from within but the summoning of my own muse. O Gawd, let him be Gabriel rather than the dark dragon himself. May I find some way to soothe all of this pain by myself so that I, before the end of these forty days of fire, forty days of rain, face the very uncoiling of the snaky, imperfect soil from which the whole world is made. May I fight back these ghosts and lusts with the purest love I can muster, maybe for one last time. May I take this silly sword of mine and strike one last blow to the machine mind that has sucked us all down. May I find compassion from someone, somewhere, who will take my call via coin, prayer, Visa or Mastercard ...

~

It starts with a big bang on a motel room door in Scottsdale, Arizona, where things like this aren’t supposed to happen. Or, at least, they are rare. Or, at least, they have never happened exactly like this before. After you have been in enough cheap motels, after all, if you are real good at pattern recognition, which is really less of a science more like a, well, instinctive thing, you can pretty much trust the bizarre nature of a particular event as worth noting. In this case, the hotel room bursts open, waking you from your sleep at about midnight. Suddenly you are awake, your head is spinning, the door is open, your girl is gone, and so is your dog. So is your weed. Everything that gave you solace during the course of that ridiculous day is missing, in fact, and the noise outside your door is a weird sort of rumbling of bodies flying against each other, rude noises, angry sounds of men in some kind of heat of anger. Some kind of riot is going on outside your door, which has burst open. There is a big dog bark, maybe two big bellowing big dog barks, for just a moment, but then that’s gone, too, and the shouting of men in heat remains as sound waves of thumping and women wimpering cascades around you. Your first thought, O. is missing, she is missing, your girl is missing, and these two things, the absence and the melee, are somehow related. So you venture out your door, and what you see in in the surreal night light, the luxury night light of Scottsdale, in a parking lot with a great big high end department store logo glow in the background of your sight, a pretty place where perfect people shop and corporate America plunders ... in this soft spacious parking lot where many mall-dressed trophy wives have carried their bags in and out of the mall, and where touristas have parked their many cars, too, since it’s officially a Motel 6 parking lot, in Scottsdale of all places, there is a kind of cyclonic motion of men in tuxedos and women in white wedding dresses thumping on someone, apparently a black man with knotty hair. By this time, the contagion of wild violence is rolling away from your door, down the Motel Six sidewalk in front of the rooms, between the parked cars in the door, and they are wailing away on the guy, in the light. Then the cop cars come, and they have dogs, too, and they are barking. Then the cops look at you, with your mouth agape, asking you if you belong here, asking you if you are missing anything, and you say no, lying, of course, because you never tell the strange cop the strange sad inner truth of what you are thinking: Your girlfriend is missing. So is your dog and so is your pot. You deny your very deepest worry because you think, well, hell, they all must be related, right?
I relate this little Kodak moment to you, right now, from another cheap motel room in a place called Bushland, Texas. Really, it’s a place to the west of Amarillo. And these two places, the Motel 6 in Scottsdale, and this anonomoplace in Texas, because they are uniquely related, too. Through me and now, as you read this, through you. You are now being impacted, in some slight way, at least, by the wedding riot outside the door of the Motel 6 and by yes, the fact it has an impact on me.
In the time since the wedding riot, all I have really learned is the insurgents were all from out of town, and they were beating up some guy because some $3,000 wedding gift got broken. There were several arrests. If you wanted to, you could go to the Scottsdale police station and get the facts. There must be a real interesting story there about that riot. You could piece it together and make a movie out of just that. But I won’t, because I’m in a cheap motel room in Texas right now, and that event may have just as well been a hurricane, and I’ll bet all of those Katrina victims never watched much on TV during those one-year anniversary specials because they were probably just trying to deal, all the same, with the impacts of the storm. That’s me, in a nutshell. Just trying to deal with the impact of the storm.
The storm is in my head now. It has cigarrette smoke for clouds. The low pressure reading is in the chest, at the flatland level of worry. Cattle trucks are searing down the highway right now and this is one of those authentic Kerouac-like moments that maybe you wish you could experience, too, but, dear reader, I wouldn’t recommend it. Oh sure, your girl and your dog and your weed eventually returned to that Motel 6, and the riot and the disappearance were, as it turned out, unrelated. Maybe. Maybe. What can you trust anymore, anyway, based on the apparent lack of information. All you know is that Saturday, a week ago, you whole enchilada was thrown into the air, and then you're not sure not sure how or why. We all have been there. We know we have been lied too, by either the dog or the weed or or the girl or the president ... Who knows?
I know I have been lied to in Bushland. I can trust that, at least. But that’s another subject. The straightforward reason for this dissertation is hardly neccessary ... it can be about wnything about lost loves, lost dogs, a little lost doggy story ... it actually launched from a rather impromptu road trip from Scottsdale, Arizona, from a place called Morning Sun, Iowa. That’s about 1,200 miles. It’s got to be that distance, but honestly, I have rarely looked at the map throughout this entire trip. I know this country pretty well, by now, and one thing I’ve noticed that as big as it is, it’s getting smaller all of the time. But, for the sake of the honest novel and the need for plain simple record keeping, let’s just keep this epic tale in the time frame for road trip, and just let every conceivable lesson of life creep in.
Such as: If dog is man’s best friend, there are limits to this friendship, and therefore, a dog’s, um, fidelity. Because in this case the dog remained away for the rest of the night. And when sge comes back from her mysterious journey that night, you spent the next 12 hours trying to explain, how, exactly, the dog got away, and why, exactly, you have so many questions of her whereabouts for the Saturday in question. Eventually, the dog returned to the very same parking lot at about 10 a.m. Arizona time that following Sunday, acting like, hey, I’m back, where are all of the bad guys now?
We are deliriously happy at the return of the dog, but still missing the truth ... But folks, there’s just this plain fact now, whatever happened the night before, if it was enough to send a dog the size of a camel running around Scottsdale in terror, it was certainly enough to send me, the dog, and anyone else, including the wedding party, spinning hurling at high speeds onto the continent in any direction. Usually toward, or in the opposite direction of that point where we are born ...

22.12.08




O No! Not Another Parking Lot for Words!
Something about the old noon mining age lunch alarm always creeped me out in Ouray, Colorado. When the town siren went off, it hit a pitch much more inclined toward tornado sirens and pre-bombing wails. Fast trains. Hurricane winds. It was if the days of pleasantries were over, and mining, with a post-apocalptyic mind's eye for detail, was coming back in a big way. That the noon looney bell should be a town gong for immortalizing the 19th century ore boom, with its mining boss mentality, scorched-earth policies, to tell us it's noon, that means lunch, only intensified the fossilized dweeb of the San Juan mountain town's vibe. Then comes the cold wind, the first snows. By then, I was done. Thinking about Florida and Arizona. About those places where mad dogs and Englishman go. Those who work and remain, that is, who actually live there, permanently, are admired as mad, at least in secret, too. For the rest of us: to get thrown out of the heavenly mountains, which occurs from time to time, when you play the migrant journalist game ... no need to get too Miltonian about it ... right, right? ... since each new chapter begins with a getting thrown down from the sky ... To do what? Reign over hell? Well, lucky me. Lucky you.

I was thinking of George Orwell's essay, "Shooting an Elephant," when I was told they would be cutting down a troublesome tree in Ridgway's river park. Something about being led down a path following somebody with tools, in this case, town staff, was going to be, almost instinctively, comparable.
Now the essay should be memorable enough. Surely, they made everyone read it in the sixth grade, it being, among Orwell's experiential works, a lot more fun with animals than the "Animal Farm" socialist attacks of later years. Published in the 1930s when Orwell was sowing his oats in Burma, he was charged, as the most hated civil servant as a British administrator for his village, to go out and shoot an elephant.
They were still plentiful enough, apparently, in the 1930s in Burma. And Orwell, with British pride, showed his mettle to the locals.
The tree cutting seemed innocent enough, compared to elephant shooting. Luckily, I had the camera. It was one shot, tops.
But the interesting item worth naming about a town park this past week is how well it reveals the food chain of things.
You are led down the path, and there's the crew, with at least three yellow ribbons tied around the old cottonwood trees.
They struggle with the problem. Tree cutting is dangerous business. The wind is shifting. One of the men takes a rope and ties a stone around, swinging it and throwing it up to a branch, trying to get a grip for pulling it down, but not until I mention, "Um, this sounds kind of nutty."
After all, why are these trees being cut?
The answer: Insurance.
Now, for the purposes of argument, let's say in the food chain of things, corporations are actually hungrier and therefore subsuming of the individual. The human being then, is at the service of the institutional beast, so to speak, and those institutions must depend on swirling seas of money. Jittery seas at that, all twittery with billions of transactions made by millions of panicky people with keypads for hearts, cell phones for brains. Then, the one insurance multi-national still staffed to collect on the bills without the bailout, let's call it, hypothetically, KGB Corp., sends a rep out to the boonies to check out the coverage profile for Ridgway's river park.
Which turns out to be no bueno, due to the trees.
Because the town, you see, is liable, of course, to make sure the trail is safe. Someone could get killed if a branch from a tree in a park (of all places) fell and killed someone.
Happens every day.
So the roving eye of the insurance company for the town, Mr. Rep from Hypothetical KGB Corp., wanting to make sure it doesn't go bankrupt from the risk, tells the town it must "prune" the trees along the trail.
In case the wind blows. Hard.
So, being helpful, Orwellian you, living in the world where war is peace, upside down is the status quo, and amorphous blob corporations are at the top of the food chain, run then, by masters of the universe, who you serve now and always will, suggest some tips on how they might do a better job.
Because you are the loyal civil servant now.
"Swing it like a sling from the side," you might say. Or, "Just get cracking with the saw and let the tree fall where it may."
Now the nice thing to note, being helpful in regards to the insurance risk, as well as thinking green (implant smiley face emoticon here), is many other trees are planted in the park, which is a preserve, to replace those 30-year-old cottonwoods along the trail. As Jeff Goldblum says in "Jurassic Park," "Life finds a way."
Now a few last basics: A park is a preserve of nature, put on life support.
War is peace. Silence is golden, and what else, oh yes, insurance saves lives. In fact, that's what they charge the town for …
well maybe, the whole insurance concept is really kind of lost on me, actually … But a town park saves life, this much is also true.
Isn't feeling "safer" the name of that thing, anyway? Go ahead. Shoot.

~

Oh well, at least I have just recently been able to remove myself from the local scene as a scourge to the community. That is, I no longer hitchhike full-time. Bought a a Ford Exploder instead.
This after doing some research on the origins of the term "hitchhiker." After that, I was aghast. During my short time there trying to get back and forth to and from work in the Ridgway and Ouray offices for our two newspapers, I simply felt increasingly crushed by the loneliness and rejection of being one of the few people in the region who seemed to be hitchhiking.
I was not so much horrified by who was actually picking me up. They were all truly interesting people. In fact, they were not the sort of folk who I might have suspected to be sympathetic to the practice. More often then not, they were people who drove SUVs or large pick-up trucks. Once, I was picked up by someone in some kind of red vintage Mercedes sports car. He was a 70-year-old roaming engineer who had just been to Iraq, where he did safety inspections for a new power plant that had failed to reach any kind of completion there. His problem in Iraq was that the locals kept killing members of his security convoys. Apparently, I did not scare him. So he picked me up after about 25 cars went by coming down the hill out of Ouray.
I did not scare him in the least. In fact, he was sorry, after our brief conversation during the drive to Ridgway, that I couldn't continue on with him to California. He hated to be alone.
I also dislike loneliness. I don't know how many people carpool locally now. But hitchhikers during my time of day were so rare, during the rush hours, I'd have to say the practice is completely out of fashion.
Why? My guess is because it's an election year. So if anybody saw me out there with my thumb up, and they were Republican, then they just figured they'd soar on by and get a few minutes' jump on the guy who obviously doesn't look like a member of their party. This is, of course, pure paranoia (but then so much drive-by rejection will do that to a man). Though, until about three months ago, I was a member of the Republican Party, they had me pegged as a turncoat.
I should have tucked my shirt in more often, kept the sunglasses in my pocket and shaved off my beard. Apparently, according to my much too late research, that was what I needed to do to get picked up more often.
Anyway, the reason I was so aghast was I'd failed to realize just who I was aligning myself with during an election year: famous beatniks such as Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady and Hunter S. Thompson. That's no bueno for this, the season of political polarization. I should have known that of those places listed online where drivers are obliged to pick up hitchhikers, these places include Cuba, where government vehicles and lorry drivers with unoccupied seats must pick up hitchhikers.
I think if there was a line of hitchhikers where I stood with my thumb out, it might have gone a lot better. Like some kind of bus stop for hitchers, wannabe carpoolers then, for a more organized and benevolent society. But, strangely, I was never picked up by anybody in one of those sweet-looking hybrids such as a Prius. No clear members of the counterculture, driving beaters or VW busses, who were obviously linked up with the sympathies I mentioned above, cared to stop. Often, they were .. phones and tended to look away, or wave, or smile. Sometimes, they just shrugged.
Now I could write something poetic about the best lacking all conviction, but I won't, because it seems to be those who the self-assured gusto, those full of "passionate intensity," who were offering the rides.
Instead, I'll just thank those who picked me up just as my faith in humanity was sinking to its lowest. As well as my new carpool buddy, who I won't mention until I learn whether or not he cares to be aligned with those literary scaliwags I mention above. All of these people are fully due for some "instant karma," which is the name of that thing.

~

Here is what life is like writing newspaper fluff in a mountain resort town: The summer invasion is over, and this loosely wound interior village is more forever changed than it could ever, by itself, change the big bad global village. Now we can only attend the Horizontal Zoning Slash Main Street Vitality Festival for the remainder of the week and try to get our senses back. As the citizens crash from the curious letdown of having this trampling upon the ground end as suddenly as it began, the early impressions fade even faster. Before the assault of an entirely different festival demographic overwhelms you with each passing weekend, what's needed is some quick cultural anthropology. Maybe then we could learn more about how when why how come main street doesn't get the traffic even with the so-called "numbers." Even with big, big so-called "numbers." Even if numbers are, indeed, disappearing before our eyes.

Creative solutions are needed to better channelize this flood. But first, we need to get the information in. It's really like studying the tides. They go one way, toward the festival in a hurry, at first, then drag themselves the other way with this lost, "now what" look as the day and night progresses. A good grounding comes from a sense of scientific objectivity, which in this case means getting over the tendency by locals to avoid falling trap to a popular sense of general elitist loathing. You know, that protective feeling that these proceedings are driven by lowland criminal invaders sucking the very life out of the planet. Why don't you just admit it? Of course they are sucking the life out of the planet, but you love those numbers. They are not criminals at all. They are you among a throng of 10,000 mirrors of holiday town: All reflecting back upon you, and, where you came from ... What to write about? Even a seemingly exquisite if expensive idea such as widening the sidewalk on the south side of the Avenue, which would heat the sidewalk, softens from the trampling. But until all of that "altitude adjustment" business is settled deep down inside, little things can be done, little handy creative solutions, fully enforceable, that can be thrust upon the community at large.
You have hopes. This is a team effort, after all. Sacrifices need to be made. Considering the large number of taco-shaped cowboy hats worn by out of towners during events, it might be a good idea to write for local retailers to try to turn the tides on this style. The actual style of the headwear barely matters. You could offer new demand by having the entire local citizenry wear a new style next year. These hats would be "comped" to all locals, maybe through a direct mailing, and then after the end of the festival these new hats could be returned to the stores selling them. Community journalism in a nutshell: Community organizing, actually.
If this seems like an expensive proposition, then this "monkey see, monkey do" sales approach column could be merely be tried first with the mass-mailing of 1,500 "Funny Statement About Holiday Town Goes Here" T-shirts. If this funny statement shirt goes over well during the festival weekend, the Friday paper – you should be able to tell if the funny statement is used more commonly in speech as the weekend progresses – then you could move to taking photos of large, fancy hats the next festival.
A number of times, while moving powerlessly through the summer crowds, I heard some people, fully satisfied for an hour that they had done everything else, decided it was time to go shoplifting.
Probably the biggest and best idea to offer, in terms of figuring out a way to resolve town coffers coughing from the demands of so many civic needs, is to tax cell phone use. Now that would be a column ... the word of the day for the street!... One thing that was noticeable: Cell phone use decreased and conversations increased as the week went on. Maybe a lot of visiting cell phones just died from the lack of available juice. But there's demand and supply there, as well as the seed of the aforementioned retail-boosting concept … phone plug-in booths! Cell phone waxing? Cell phone massage?

Maybe the new hats for the following season could include a Kevlar lining to thwart the bombardment of invisible cell phone waves caused by this underappreciated kind pollution. Maybe that pollution can be met with a mitigation formula in the town land use code where anybody who uses a cell phone could fund a new concept. Instead of affordable housing, we could fund "affordable retail." Take the cell phone issue, for example. It's an urban plague, folks. Nobody in the cities talks to anyone around them in public places anymore. Just to their five friends on their cell phones. It's society's invisible isolating backyard fence. So here's the overview and master plan, the last in the series: Disney people, next year, hide your cell phones when tourists are in view. And wear different hats. Act natural. Do "it" in the road, but scoop it up, too. Perhaps, as the weekend hippies drive away quickly, someone might be inspired by this act of environmental self-policing and then, just then, change behavior in the cities. Be willing to answer questions, but when you are caught in the current of people going one way down the street when you need to go another, feel free to ask questions, create a "listening." Confess in the gondola and be very, very interesting ...yes, yes,always good advice column stuff ... Eccentric even, without being too scary.
But hey, people kill for these mountain writing jobs: You are one of the few. Think of yourself as a resident of some kind of post-hippie, pre-apocalyptic human heritage village, and you'll be part of the downtown vitality solution, not part of the downtown vitality problem.

~

So when the boss comes in on a cold morning and says, Mac, we got to let you go, the office for the 100-year-old, old as baseball old "Newspaper That Refused to Die," did. The meaning here: Laid off, the the rest of the 10 million at the end of the Bush administration. At least in spirit. Which was fortunate, I'd run out of things to say. After the election, I felt, without a stable Republic to actually muse on, and the common opponent and fuel for fodder, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, out of the picture, it was if all of the fun circus animals had deserted me. With Obama elected, and the nation in ruins, one can only be sit back and be stunned. At least, that was the way it was starting to look for that southwestern Colorado mountain town. Especially after the first storm moved in ...

So now there are those who didn't vote for Obama who are calling him the anti-Christ .. or some such other sewercide economics cult crap ... As if what occurred while Bush was around (and he still is president), didn't bring enough Taurean bullshit to begin with! Or, as Neil Young might sing, "I don't feel like a devil but I am to them," so anyone who voted for supported him becomes the enemy, again, the children of Satan again then, too, I suppose. The godless American. The ugly fascism rising just in time for a four-score breakout of fringe hate groups, homegrown terrorists, in Mythville, America. Coming out of the woods, they are, yes ... still binding us by the old Mason Dixon line ... again ...

We can't just all get along. The world needs lines to cross, to invade. Better some invisible monkey-bat dragon-breath with a beard bird far from these shores, than, hells bells, our feudal neighbors in gated communities holding back slums... We need wars, we being the capitalist state, to keep this kind of thing from happening. Old as the crusades. Hate to be a crank about it, really, it's just that the familiar ironies won't work anymore. They just don't sound right. The blame game sounds tinny. All humor is lost. Needs reinventing. The responsibility should be shed evenly. Sadly, though we are hope despite the times, yes, the agitprop REM still ringing true ... but trying to come up with something light and sunny then, well, fuck you too ...

So we come down from the mountains of Blue state Colorado, making Arizona just a little more blue, too. The music as we cross the desert in our 1992 Ford Exploder, a $300 bitch of a buy from a derelict quote friend in the Telluride high-country, a world of troubles onto itself, in full need of an exorcism and a new transmission, the car, not Telluride, that is, the big old green beast taking us across the great expanse,the big wide sky, well noticed after living in canyons and between fourteeners for so long, in the early afternoon shadows, the daylight-muted snows ... the great expanse, through Ship Rock, New Mexico, down the old route 666 ... people ask how it's going, fuck if I know, but it seemed the right thing to do ... to hurl back down to the past, to the burbs of the North Valley of Phoenix, to where everything is comfortable as the bolted down cement, where the meat locker of convenience feeds all, and there's gas, gas, gas, for everyone. New roads, big highways clashing with steal and snaky moans. Why change anything? Who could feel so Blue? Heck, the funniest thing I've seen was the guy, who had the good (fortune?) of working for AIG, having trouble with his brand new custom Mustang, big yellow police attractor, so out of sync with its tech ... couldn't get it out of the parking lot. I thought gee, being on the Governor's ski team was cool ... When the morning begins, you can hear the hum. It vibrates in the heart. ... startles me awake.

~
Thoughts written on a canyon map, during a coffee, bidi and piece of some kind of prettily made bread? While Gazing at a Hummer-Covered Parking Lot at a Gentrified Suburban Republican Bistro, I charted this course with a red string on a map of black chalk. The roads are many, the final choice, difficult. I climb up the cafe canyon walls to get a better view, to see over the trees and see my way to you ... Having returned like Prometheus to my city in pretty chains of light, the rains have stopped like Porches braking in the sun, which burns, big and bright, drying this coffee stop tabletop with its eviscerating truth, inspired by just the glint of the sun, writing ...


Gathering force, moving toward
the majestic and mysterious,
the merely merrily whimsical
snowcapped peaks of Ouray,
just a day away, as Latin horns
are piped through soccer moms
in sweatpants and motors purr

Is this city immune to war?

This cream of violence
rises to the top
For what they eat and taste
and buy and like,
they will not stop

Mechanized sweet, sweet soap,
the umbilical sword of the clean,
is the last potable hope
of water for the healing
and giving peace a hearing

And while the dance world cult is searing,
I advance across an asphalt clearing:
In my heart, the key is just the start,
this language of escape
is now my art


~


Then comes the phone call. From the landlord. I've been laid off? No way, I say. Some kinda mistake. But she says that's what they are telling people who call for me at another one of these mountain top newspapers, these self-important scions of the late great age of newsprint ... see the fall ... write the headline, tight, down the column ...
Enter the panic ... the width .. the wake up from sleep. Those old sleep apnea blues ...
Ok, Ok, breathe ... just breathe ... no way to breathe.
i call the office. Nobody in who knows anything but a young lanky dude, a corporate officer in training.
Yeah, he says, "laid off."
No, I think. That wasn't the deal. I had come in just days before. Explaining the situation. No, i say, I was just moving out of the house! That this old house thing was a metaphor for the county at large. No, they knew. There was no Tesla coil in the attic, except in Telluride, as another dangerous idea that almost made sense for the Telluride Tech Fest, an idea which I adored, like the rest of the town ... hence, the passion for my work ... a Tesla coil in my attic ... are you shitin' me?
Told them I had big plans, big ... had a place on Wilson Mesa, dig? ... apparently not ... memories now of someone in a codeine haze ... of some young prince straightening the whole vacation pay fiasco misunderstanding out ... meanwhile, the media king, Set, is somewhere sleeping, I suppose, or looking into the mirror, seeing if he still looks like his weekly column's (if that often) avatar ... in the sleep of Narcissus ...
But this much I know, truth is a defense ... you can trust the truth ... and this old meme-or-rie, that graces with age ... rages with grace ... grows like a leafy old tree, it does, despite the recently discovered condition for forgetting how to spell some words but remember others, which he doesn't even know the meaning for yet, that he can now spell with ease ...
So there I was ... using the last of my damn vacation pay ... wonderin' who knows what the truth is, what the defense, therefore is ... for such behavior 40 miles away, in beautiful, snow glowing mountains ... some vindictive judgment rendered downhill by Zeus, I suppose ...
So I meet still with the lady about the Wilson Mountain place ... she's incredulous, after being so open about the idea of us moving in right away at first ... we leave the meeting crazed and confused, like the floor has fallen out beneath us ... I mean, we had the income, met with the guy living in the place, the dream, at last!
... so then I finally call in to the people I work with, who I would always apologize on the street for, because I knew better, but suddenly I don't, and I'm scared as hell that it's happening again ... the life as a personal Bible thing, the from Genesis rebirth to the very apocalypse we all try to avoid, but seems to part of our DNA, at least, to my persecution complex, always revealed, due to my sensitivities, in spades ...
The truth is a defense ... sure, sure, that's the racket ...
So I call in from 40 miles away, gas at maybe $3 bucks a gallon, beer still being more expensive ... I call in from my former work office from the emergency center because the phone has been unplugged and Jaimie is on a wire and the dog is still missing and people are putting up flyers and the landlord is playing some weird game and fuck fuck fuck ... the codeine is talking again on the other end of the line ... wants me to write freelance, instead of the regular gig ...
Fuck fuck fuck ... I hesitate, try to breathe ... my head going no no no ... that never works ... it's too discretionary, and then peters down to nothing ... I've fallen for that one a bunch ... but now I have no choice, codeine says ... so I take the deal ... yeah, nice guys, on trial, always waive their rights and take the deal ... because they believe in justice, the truth, in the availability of social services, and all of the rest ...
Fooooool!
Later, when it all gets way too official, we are all on some strange and deadline deadly phone line, talking up our versions of the truth and everybody's memory has gone sour but mine ... it's positively Reaganesque, as in no stick, especially with mad King Set, whose voice now slides by with each question, each issue, each wrinkle in their version of the truth ... three-against-one now, my one, their 3 ... my one truth, imperfect, both rational and irrational, just like everyone else, spinning within the eye of pleasure and incredible, usually self-inflicted pain with the terrible silver slickness of the snake ... geez, getting Biblical, see it ... See it! ...
See. It. Breathe.
Three journos on the phone line, maybe 100 years of journalistic experience chatting it all up ... the truth! ... What the great Arbitror must think? ...
I tell it all ... and their wrinkles don't add up ... I weep in a sense of accomplishment ... laugh at the young thin dude, how this old friend can't remember something we talked about on the phone, twice ... the corporate line ... I "honestly can't remember is the last thing this Judas" says, but it hardly seems relevant ... the great Arbitror has all of the information it needs ... and it all should be written up as a cautionary tale for the Columbia Journalism Review ...
But see, the demiurge is only the maker of a dish on a plate to be served up for the eater of souls! See, the demiurge, can't believe the truth when it gets heard, because the very image it casts, of truth, of social justice, of equality ... it's all a fake, a lie, not purposefully so, but most certainly an illusion ...
"Story not credible," sayeth the Judge, much later, as if by then it even matters ...
Cause it doesn't bring the dawg back, so so speak, in a manner of speaking, on the matter of, yeah, well, the truth.

11.12.08





The Next Time I See You, Satan, I'm Going to Beat You Up!
Coming down the mountain, moving south, out of Oregon and into the Jefferson valley, I could see the clouds, wrung out by the winds, streaming across the top of Mount Shasta, a white-capped behemoth overlooking the region like a Himalayan monarch. Most mountains do. They have that quality. They are monarchical. They press against the sky and there’s no telling them anything. They are in charge. We wait on them. They are never pleased. Like the wind, they own the land, forcing their will upon all inhabitants. And so on this day, seabirds, white gulls of some kind (I wish I knew what kind), were oddly trouncing around, sifting for food at the road side rest site, placed like a dish of rest at the mountain’s valley table. They seemed lost, as if the wind had blown them there from far away. I asked the rest site attendants, one was clearly retarded and the other one, a Latino) if it was unusual for these birds to be there. The retarded one mumbled something that was lost in the 50 mph winds. The Latino said the white gulls always come in the summer. I thanked them and then walked away, then realized: It was March.
The point of this passage was to get out of the rain. And just this once, the sun burst through the clouds and painted this valley in a way valleys are supposed to be painted by the sun. Great broad clean sweeps of color. At this rest stop along U.S. 5, I got out to take a piss and a picture.
The wind was blowing hard, damn hard. I’d been driving for six hours at least, after leaving Canyonville, Oregon earlier that morning (a nice little place that I eventually found a little disturbing, due to its bible belt undercurrent that packed its more hermetic charms in tight, its health food store, its cyber cafe, its large white masons hall, all tucked in tight in a womb of paternal Jehovah protectionism) and was about ready to go postal about the weather. Really had had enough.
Six miserable months the storms, my sweeties, rendered me into complete unreliable narrator-hood. Now, after facing numerable challenges to my sanity as I have re-traced our steps to this dream of a life at the far end of our continent, I have been reduced to madly running through the Mohave desert in the cold and dark in order to find a fucking telephone so that I could hear her voice and know it’s going to be OK. But such assurances have escaped me. Instead, after facing yet another horrible Olympus on the road up and down the pass in Tehachapi, California, where I determined the most deadly foe to man isn’t the horror of nature, but instead, the nature of the California drivers who hurl through the world on some kind of high-octane hell without a care in the world for who they run off the road, I descended into yet another underworld to find I’m not worthy of this mission.
Now, as I face this cracked mirror in a motel room in Barstow, another place being cold-blasted by the hideous wind, I am tortured by a lingering premonition. A previous night’s dream at Sis’s place in Sacramento included, in the crash of iron and mix of metal, the literal sound of her crying that exists only in my head, the sound of the word “OK,” as I imagined maybe you too were succumbing to the same maddening drought of sunlight as we keep moving south, further south, only to find the sun has seemed to have flown forever from view. I turned on the television only briefly in this pitiful motel room to find the planet beset by volcanoes and cyclones and endless war, as well as a nation preoccupied with meaningless trivial little follies like basketball playoffs and “reality” series carnivals. I tried to call anyone I could but it was too late at night. The loneliness of the road had undone me. I scrambled to find some solution to this emptiness I felt, this gut-wrenching doubt about what, if anything, we were to become.
And worse, a cracked mirror reveals the face of a man reduced to complete narcissism and treachery beyond even what he knew he was capable. It began in Canyonville, I believe, when the cyber cafe lady said my work was too irreligious to even be considered marketable commodity in their town. At first, I rejoiced. At first, I rested in the anarchist artist’s glee that comes from provoking such a strong reaction. Then this obsession of mine to be a bard the whole world. This outright pathetic craving to be heard and understood was bolstered by a positive response in Ashland, land of a bards, a pretty, perfect land of Cathar glee, where poets, playwrights and other bards can be celebrated and congratulated and adored, safe and free to think and blather amongst themselves. I had an audience behind a coffeehouse during a short break from the road where I could be the man I imagine myself to be: The sage, the poet, the mystic, the raky rascal on the road. Oh god, how I get so like this when I'm out there ...
Then I was off again to face more storms. I tried and tried again to find some lightness in me, you know ... the humor in all this ... I have come one thousand miles in two days of driving. During that time, I have seen the sun maybe three times, maybe for an hour or two, tops. Meanwhile, the earth is breaking open. The birds are either sick or lost. Volcanoes across the world are pouring black coal into the sky. This will only increase the greenhouse effect. A cyclone the size of a continent is tormenting the other side of the world, and here, on the Pacific Coast, the big hand of God is slapping America across the face with a cold, wet fist. And I, under this fist, can only marvel but cannot laugh. I cannot find the lightness necessary to carry any reader.
Raja, our dog, is saying nothing. Just like the rest of us, he has no answers. He is sent away with me as some kind of substitute for love, I suppose, and I answered the bell the night before this one by cradling him in a blanket as he shook in the cold on the porch of the white-picket fence home of Sis of Sacramento. He responded by refusing his food and obviously entreating me to find our way back to her. But I have nothing now but the fear all is lost, that something has gone hideously wrong with all of our plans, that it’s all my fault, due to my frailties and pointless yearnings, my hunger, my shame, my ceaseless clutching for some kind of answer to the internal and external system of demise pr entropy of all living things.
I have this bottomless fear that when I last looked at her, the wolf woman goddess in the rear view mirror, I had seen her for the last time. That you would realize, as we began to retrace our steps, too, we have akk faced the rain-swept valleys and snow-capped monarchs, as you searched your memory banks and found new reasons to doubt; reasons to love, to pass the miles ... going forward, but with a big question mark on yer head ...

~

First, it starts out with her leaning into a storm. Saying something about some ancient mythic devil rising from the sea. She is dancing wildly, in a dervish ... singing some wild name, the wind kicking 50 at least, the storms of America lashing into the shore ... We are still back on the Oregon Coast, then, with her Cappy sister priestess, who is also facing her own demons under these daunting conditions, and we have all come undone and grown tired from the move, come undone together and gone wildly into some other more suitable direction. Like Portland. Or Canada. Or maybe we could have just stayed put and even as I write this have remained hunkered down in our sad empty sleepiness owl’s nest of a house on the Oregon Coast, fighting off the golem and gargoyles of the Chinook winds with bouts of beer and bible beating. With Reiki on the run. With wild-eyed goddess energy that knows better than to find anything decent enough to grasp onto when it comes to the flighty love of a mere mortal man. I imagine two queens who have basically decided to rule the waves and currents of the collapsing world on their own, leaving me to listen to trains in the night, to wait for the daylight to pull myself together in order to carry all of this crap, this boatload of property, this totem dance of overwhelming memories, these dirty clothes and dog-barfed blankets, all of this material scarred earthenware, this skeletal shell of consumable us, to my own private, personal, sex-crazed, ego-driven kingdom hall of hell.
Now, in this black desert of the night, I have this ten by ten cell as a shelter from the chaos outside, but nothing to soothe me from within but the summoning of my own muse. O Gawd, let him be Gabriel rather than the dark dragon himself. May I find some way to soothe all of this pain by myself so that I, before the end of these forty days of fire, forty days of rain, face the very uncoiling of the snaky, imperfect soil from which the whole world is made. May I fight back these ghosts and lusts with the purest love I can muster, maybe for one last time. May I take this silly sword of mine and strike one last blow to the machine mind that has sucked us all down. May I find compassion from someone, somewhere, who will take my call via coin, prayer, Visa or Mastercard ...

~

It starts with a big bang on a motel room door in Scottsdale, Arizona, where things like this aren’t supposed to happen. Or, at least, they are rare. Or, at least, they have never happened exactly like this before. After you have been in enough cheap motels, after all, if you are real good at pattern recognition, which is really less of a science more like a, well, instinctive thing, you can pretty much trust the bizarre nature of a particular event as worth noting. In this case, the hotel room bursts open, waking you from your sleep at about midnight. Suddenly you are awake, your head is spinning, the door is open, your girl is gone, and so is your dog. So is your weed. Everything that gave you solace during the course of that ridiculous day is missing, in fact, and the noise outside your door is a weird sort of rumbling of bodies flying against each other, rude noises, angry sounds of men in some kind of heat of anger. Some kind of riot is going on outside your door, which has burst open. There is a big dog bark, maybe two big bellowing big dog barks, for just a moment, but then that’s gone, too, and the shouting of men in heat remains as sound waves of thumping and women wimpering cascades around you. Your first thought, O. is missing, she is missing, your girl is missing, and these two things, the absence and the melee, are somehow related. So you venture out your door, and what you see in in the surreal night light, the luxury night light of Scottsdale, in a parking lot with a great big high end department store logo glow in the background of your sight, a pretty place where perfect people shop and corporate America plunders ... in this soft spacious parking lot where many mall-dressed trophy wives have carried their bags in and out of the mall, and where touristas have parked their many cars, too, since it’s officially a Motel 6 parking lot, in Scottsdale of all places, there is a kind of cyclonic motion of men in tuxedos and women in white wedding dresses thumping on someone, apparently a black man with knotty hair. By this time, the contagion of wild violence is rolling away from your door, down the Motel Six sidewalk in front of the rooms, between the parked cars in the door, and they are wailing away on the guy, in the light. Then the cop cars come, and they have dogs, too, and they are barking. Then the cops look at you, with your mouth agape, asking you if you belong here, asking you if you are missing anything, and you say no, lying, of course, because you never tell the strange cop the strange sad inner truth of what you are thinking: Your girlfriend is missing. So is your dog and so is your pot. You deny your very deepest worry because you think, well, hell, they all must be related, right?
I relate this little Kodak moment to you, right now, from another cheap motel room in a place called Bushland, Texas. Really, it’s a place to the west of Amarillo. And these two places, the Motel 6 in Scottsdale, and this anonomoplace in Texas, because they are uniquely related, too. Through me and now, as you read this, through you. You are now being impacted, in some slight way, at least, by the wedding riot outside the door of the Motel 6 and by yes, the fact it has an impact on me.
In the time since the wedding riot, all I have really learned is the insurgents were all from out of town, and they were beating up some guy because some $3,000 wedding gift got broken. There were several arrests. If you wanted to, you could go to the Scottsdale police station and get the facts. There must be a real interesting story there about that riot. You could piece it together and make a movie out of just that. But I won’t, because I’m in a cheap motel room in Texas right now, and that event may have just as well been a hurricane, and I’ll bet all of those Katrina victims never watched much on TV during those one-year anniversary specials because they were probably just trying to deal, all the same, with the impacts of the storm. That’s me, in a nutshell. Just trying to deal with the impact of the storm.
The storm is in my head now. It has cigarrette smoke for clouds. The low pressure reading is in the chest, at the flatland level of worry. Cattle trucks are searing down the highway right now and this is one of those authentic Kerouac-like moments that maybe you wish you could experience, too, but, dear reader, I wouldn’t recommend it. Oh sure, your girl and your dog and your weed eventually returned to that Motel 6, and the riot and the disappearance were, as it turned out, unrelated. Maybe. Maybe. What can you trust anymore, anyway, based on the apparent lack of information. All you know is that Saturday, a week ago, you whole enchilada was thrown into the air, and then you're not sure not sure how or why. We all have been there. We know we have been lied too, by either the dog or the weed or or the girl or the president ... Who knows?
I know I have been lied to in Bushland. I can trust that, at least. But that’s another subject. The straightforward reason for this dissertation is hardly neccessary ... it can be about wnything about lost loves, lost dogs, a little lost doggy story ... it actually launched from a rather impromptu road trip from Scottsdale, Arizona, from a place called Morning Sun, Iowa. That’s about 1,200 miles. It’s got to be that distance, but honestly, I have rarely looked at the map throughout this entire trip. I know this country pretty well, by now, and one thing I’ve noticed that as big as it is, it’s getting smaller all of the time. But, for the sake of the honest novel and the need for plain simple record keeping, let’s just keep this epic tale in the time frame for road trip, and just let every conceivable lesson of life creep in.
Such as: If dog is man’s best friend, there are limits to this friendship, and therefore, a dog’s, um, fidelity. Because in this case the dog remained away for the rest of the night. And when sge comes back from her mysterious journey that night, you spent the next 12 hours trying to explain, how, exactly, the dog got away, and why, exactly, you have so many questions of her whereabouts for the Saturday in question. Eventually, the dog returned to the very same parking lot at about 10 a.m. Arizona time that following Sunday, acting like, hey, I’m back, where are all of the bad guys now?
We are deliriously happy at the return of the dog, but still missing the truth ... But folks, there’s just this plain fact now, whatever happened the night before, if it was enough to send a dog the size of a camel running around Scottsdale in terror, it was certainly enough to send me, the dog, and anyone else, including the wedding party, spinning hurling at high speeds onto the continent in any direction. Usually toward, or in the opposite direction of that point where we are born ...


Lest we try to remember ...
Here's what I think about organized religion: Right after 9/11, you'll wishfully forget, there were the anthrax attacks, and, after that, a rash of copycat hoax mailings. One day, while I was living in Ipswich, Massachusetts, I went to an interview for a journalism job in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and it just so happened on that day that the whole staff had been freaked out by one of these copycat mailings.
So, as an ever helpful soul, I told them about a theory I had based on my own wacked out mind at the time. If you could take your mail, put it at the bottom of a box, then cover it up with dirty laundry, especially dirty socks, then leave it there for a while, you could neutralize the anthrax with your own defending fungus microbes. Then, you could read your mail without worries.
Well, as you can imagine, I didn't get the job. But as far as the anthrax went, it never got me. And I felt a lot better.
That, in a shoebox, is my metaphor for organized religion. A bunch of dirty laundry, put in a box and hidden for a while, to make everyone feel better. And so they do. Who am I to argue?

~

What has happened to artistic expression since Sept. 11 as it’s transmitted through
any kind of media (or anyone claiming to be a medium), from the political satire of
"The Colbert Report" and "The Daily Show" to the mega-bombastic sequel to the classic post-apocalyptic thriller in any theater near you. To the episodes of “Survivor.” To every creative impulse that every tried to be a light in the darkness; to all those media images that are flowing through us now: How do we respond? How do we deal creatively with our own struggle to find the appropriate voice? How do we know the right thing to say, when we see death, so much death? He do we contend with what David Byrne of the Talking Heads once anticipated in “Life During Wartime”:

“Ain’t got no speakers
Ain’t got no headphones,
Ain’t got no music to play.”


After many knee-jerk reactions to Sept. 11, including a slew of benefit performances
by rock stars and actors, there was a shaky sense of assurance. After an alleged victory over the Taliban, followed by their resurgence, Americans crawled out of the foxholes and flooded back into the malls, then the floods and economic crisis of late 2008 flooded right back out. Nevertheless, Sunday’s gladiatorial epic, otherwise known as the NFL, stormed right on through from Super Bowl to Super Bowl. Like a country immune to war, then, not so immune. A country dotted like a push pin map of the Stars and Stripes remains as a menacing reminder of who we have become ... and then the election of 2008 ... as if every now and then the electorate feels guilty for its leadership and responds.
For several years, anything that strays from a patriotic vision was likely to be, with the force of a fully diligent flight crew, wrestled to the ground and whisked away: A terrible beauty was born. But where does it stand now?

~

Seth Butler, out of a concern for air pollution on North Shore of Massachusetts
and a need to burn film for a photo essay for a class at Montserrat College, loaded a
roll of film and fired.
He pointed his weapon, a truth-telling device, at the churned and weathered brown
spires of the Salem Power Plant. Since photos never lie, or, at least, a picture beats a thousand words, he figured in some small way the images might flesh out of the mystery and wonder of the place. He thought the suspected poisons made possible on a daily basis by the plant might be explicated by his pictorial essay, and through this kind of truth we might all be saved from this inconvenience, or, at least, that we might all enjoy some breathtaking pictures of the alleged poisoning taking place.
In fact, such satanic mills have been fodder for artists since William Blake. In fact,
power plants and factories will always be great targets for interesting photos. Especially now. Technological wonders perched on American shores will always make great targets. For artists. And for terrorists.
Which, for Seth Butler, age 22, of Vermont, became part of the problem.
After Sept. 11, as a he snapped on the lens and took in the fall New England air, he
looked at the monumental smokestacks, trying to see what the relationship was between
himself, the lens and the world at war----not so much the brother-against-brother battle, but man-against-nature war.
“I was just struggling with how to deal with it,” he says.

~

If the medium is the message, then the date, Sept. 11, is the portal where we pour all
of our pain, and then, put it on display.
The message is our mantra, our artistic Alamo. Lest we forget, every shark-eyed cub
reporter tooling around the town halls of Salem, Beverly, Gloucester and Marblehead
has felt a nearly subconscious duty to post that date, Sept. 11, at least once or twice, like staples into the newsprint, glossy or cheap, of whatever passes for local media.
One reporter, well after the attacks, typed “Sept. 11” in four times within the text of an article that had absolutely nothing to do with the war or terror, real or imaginary.
(Well, actually, even in some tangential way, it was hard to fail to find some way the war against terror might apply to each and every thing we did in a daily lives, from trips to the mall to articles written under intense deadline.)
Plagued by nightmares before a pilgrimage to Ground Zero in New York City, the
writer provided repeated semi-accidental advertising for our national numeral of
mourning, anger and fear, for all of the shell-shocked sensibilities, destructive or
creative, which launched our nation into a heightened state of awareness (whatever that means) on Sept. 11. To write Sept. 11 in copy, in short, became our patriotic duty as muckrackers and documentarians for our times.
For example, so far this article has used the date five times. The date, Sept. 11 (OK,
that’s six) flows like water, like shorthand, or better yet, a link to the streaming media of shock, horror, and yes, nationalistic fervor, our personal bond to (what it believes to be) justice and (unbelievable) vengeance. By expressing oneself in this way, in times of mass hypnotic states of hysteria, war, famine and scary bad TV, we discover the most constructive choice in terms of reacting to the world around us.
I mean, why send a missile when maybe a simple e-mail note or a Hallmark card
would do? “Hey,” we write, “Remember Sept. 11, and get well soon.”

~

As they say, the medium (Or, the media) is the message. So is writing the date, Sept.
11 (seven). On posters, stamps, newspaper supplements, whatever we can get our hands
on.
But what is the most appropriate way to express oneself on the big blank page of life
during a time of national trauma, and yes, tight security? The Urizen archons of control, the warlords and the convergent media paradigms, are all in sync with the Union at War.
What if you are a dissenter? A pacifist? With dark skin? Maybe even a Canadian.
Or worse, an Islamic art dealer who needs to take a plane to Paris?
A Hub taxi driver?
A Quaker who just woke up one day, and, feeling his or her oats, decided they had
something to say?
A photographer on the North Shore of Massachusetts who pointing and firing near
some power plant smokestacks?
Better think twice. First figure out if it’s naughty, or, nice. Think twice before you
click.
But then the reversal came true, especially after the release of "Fahrenheit 911" before the election of 2004. Slowly and surely, as the war became less popular, a whole new sense of media emerged.

~

Seth Butler, age 22, photography student at Montserrat, isn’t an idiot. As a cub
photojournalist he knew that when firing off snapshots of satanic mills in Salem during wartime, it’s best to let the most immediately available authority in on what you are up to.
“I went up to the police officer out front of the plant, gave them three IDs, and
warned them that I was shooting photos for a project,” he says.
Butler thought he’d received permission, at that point, since he was on public
property, to start firing away with his telephoto lens. The guard at the gate said sure, whatever.
“But then this guy pulls up,” a security guard, he says. “I just wanted to do my work.
They told me I had to leave.”

~

The bombardment of the global media, crashing all day, all night upon the New
England shores, lighting up the giant video screens of Times-Square (still standing) and the pubs of London (last time checked), and yes, your living room, became overwhelming.
Our sense of freedom and free expression, in every aspect of our daily lives, from
Paris to Portsmouth, became critically impacted. Especially so for those of us in the
curious position of being at the seacoast front of a new kind of war when the media
buzzword, as in “terror,” is the message, and the enemy could be just about anyone.
“Since Sept. 11, as a photographer,” says Ron DiRito, a teacher at Montserrat whose
specialty is art and media and its context and meaning in society, “I don’t think they
understand what it’s like for us. I think the rest of the country doesn’t have the same kind of …,” he pauses, looking for ways to explain how it feels to be at the front of this new war, then, completing the thought: “ Everybody in New York understands it better than other people in the country. The physical distance changes our perception of something. There is this overwhelming sensibility.
“We have learned to tolerate each other better, but on the other hand, there is that
thing going on, you don’t know who to suspect. This is still relatively trying to be
understood. I don’t think we have processed it culturally and socially.”
But, once it did, America's appetite for violence in the media soared ...

~

“They watched me leave and get back into my car,” says Seth Butler, spurned
photojournalist after being unable to capture very much of any possible dangers,
through photographic realism, of the alleged poisoning of the sky at the Salem power
plant.
As he moved on into an intersection, at a speed of 15 miles per hour, the legal limit,
a white pickup truck sped in front of Butler’s vehicle and slammed on the brakes. “He
must of have going thirty five when he went by me and stopped,” he says.
“This cop says, ‘Some people want to talk to you.’ ”
Another police car pulled up, and then another. The local arm of the security state
was coming down on Seth Butler, age 22, of Vermont, like something out of a
Raymond Chandler novel.
“A large black SUV with tinted windows pulled up next. I kept my hands in clear
view,” he said. “I had the film …,” he laughed nervously, visibly shaken, as he spread
photos of American flag imagery upon a table in the media lab basement at Montserrat.
“I was in possession,” he admits, “of concealed film.”

~

For all practical intents, seemingly, the latest CD by Madonna was for several years rendered not so much obscene but most certainly oblique. On the surface level (which really the only level you can really make money in the entertainment business) it’s a commercial question. What were audiences looking for?
Perhaps everyone had seen enough. That was at least the sentiment immediately
after the attacks exploded so cinematically onto the real world’s stage. But things have changed. While it was hard to know what to feel, at first, the natural inclination toward unity, even for writers, artists and performers, who are often malcontents and social renegades, even they seemed to join up and salute to the brave new paradigm: grieve now, kick ass later.
Oh sure, there was that initial sense that pyrotechnic violence on theater and
television screens was a thing of the past. But that was naive, it has been proven.
“A lot of people had the same impression, that it seemed like Hollywood, not the
real thing,” said David Goss, director of fine arts at Gordon College, of the terrorizing video of the Sept. 11 attacks. Prior to the terrible events of that day, and the subsequent season of terror that followed and continues to this day, the main concern for the planners of fall concerts, for example, might be quality, recognition, publicity, recognition, ticket sales, recognition, who might get top billing, and oh yeah, recognition. But now, everything has changed.
“People are feeling uneasy about what they once considered to be so exciting,”
Goss said.
But that's all different now. You can rate films in terms of tonnage of TNT now.

~

My first night in Ipswich was Sept. 18, 2001, and it revealed something … at least in
terms of the ripple effects (tidal wave, actually, in hardy Ipswich sea-shanty talk) of the post-Sept. 11 realization. I was feeling world weary. So much moving from town to town. I just wanted to be an old tree, not a burned out leaf in the crosswind of global or civil war. All the same, on that day, Sept. 18, I was feeling thankful for having found some shelter in the storm.
More out of accident than a sense of patriotism, I wore my blue Ralph Lauren, “Polo
Jeans Company, RL,” baseball cap, which features stripes, but no stars, because Mr.
Lauren is the only star to be allowed on this particular head-based insignia. I was a
human billboard for Ralph Lauren, patriot … even if most people only recognized my
tribal signifier: red, white and blue.
I had a beat up used copy of Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man” in my back pocket, as well as a childlike curiosity about this strange town called Ipswich. Down the street I went, toward the town center, a babe in the woods beneath a dusky sky of implied imaginary terror.

~

Was the media really ready to fess up, since Osama-style violence is only the copycat
caricature of three, hmmm, maybe four late ’80s get-the-terrorist films, two of those
starring Bruce Willis, who can walk on the White House lawn, most likely, any day of
the week without an invitation. Are post-Sept. 11 tastes no longer able to stomach the
video violence?
Yeah, right.
You only need to consider the many years conditioning, that is, what’s required to
stomach a totalitarian storm of Christmas-season escapes into Star Wars, hobbits and
pre-teenage detective wizards, Monsters, Inc., The Sopranos and on into the phantasm we go ... The Christmas of 2008 it became another of a long line of films with furies frames of evermore destruction.
In the global mythic village, the plastic monsters and war toys are as real, within the own scale, as anything you can find in the jumbled up world. Just another mask for our national fascination with violence, which is still, quite surely, anything but satiated.
While the purpose of art has not changed, the art of re-purposing myth towards the
designs of the machine are more than ever apparent. But money machines, still, easy to
come by, for some, are less easy for others. Starving artists included. So then, the big money still wins. The purpose of mass entertainment (as opposed to art), taking its Dec. 7 queue from the way the film industry rallied to the cause in the 1940s, now becomes a mouthpiece for that very same machine.
And it’s only beginning: Coming to a theater near you – a lock-step, achy breaky
heart sort of thing, with a plastic Bill Murray doll for the marketing tie-in. It’s a pull-upyour-bootstraps at the boot-camp sorta flick. With real napalm, and, real renegades to storm the unsafe gates of the Republic.

~

Just then, it happened: a spontaneous moment of humanity. A grizzled old man
walked toward me. Small towns such as Ipswich, especially those that have made peace
with nature, require us to say hello. It’s the decent thing to do. But a week after Sept. 11 everyone was being decent to one another. A crying of our lot in each and every eye.
But this time my fellow pedestrian and I appeared to be on a collision course. The
man just came right up to me, took my hand and shook it, saying, “God bless you,
brother.”
I was taken aback. Maybe giggled out of a sense of surprise. I figured he saw my
cap and was thanking me for my heroism. Yes, Ipswich is a friendly little place, but
connections like these, random acts of humanity, were taking place all over the country.
For the first time in a long time we noticed each other, realizing we all had something – loss – to share.

~

As Boston political satirist Jimmy Tingle put it, in a post-Sept. 11 performance at
the Wingate Street Micro Theatre in Haverhill, Massachusetss, “everything has
changed.”
As part of the performance, serious even for a satirist in less apocalyptic climes, he
read from a poem he had written in reaction to Sept. 11, “911: Prayer for America.”

There’s a hole in the tip of Manhattan
A hole in the soul of America
A hole in the center of our psyche
A hole in the foundation of our confidence
There’s a hole in the faith of our country
That fills churches in search of our God
There’s a crack in the national mirror
empty chairs around the family table
9
dark houses of our missing neighbors
Vacant desks of our absent workers
On our streets,
There's a wail from the widows with candles
sobs from the orphaned with pictures
the face breaks on the lawyer of the dead women’s husband
flags and flowers for the public servants
There’s a hole in the soul of America
Afraid with the televised pictures
Numb with the morning papers
Grieving for the land they loved
Grieving for the land they lost
Grieving for the innocent victims
Grieving for the broken families
Grieving for the friends still weeping
Grieving for the ones who fight fire
Grieving for the ones who fight crime
Grieving for the volunteers by the thousands
Grieving for the City that never Sleeps
Grieving for the City on a Hill
There’s a hole in the soul of Humanity
And I pray for all of our leaders
Good people and well intentioned
Condemned to retaliation,
Doomed to retribution
Sentenced to seek revenge


~

It happened again in the local café. Strangers meeting eye to eye, recognizing the
shock and the grief and pain. We all had good radar for it, at least until Thanksgiving.
We were awakened out of our complacency, if for just a few weeks, months or years,
10 depending on your sensitivity to such things as alcohol, Duncan Donuts coffee or
intensive psychotherapy.
Times such as these bring out the best, and also the worst. It has always been that
way. In 1916, a small contingent of Irish patriots (today we might call them terrorists), took over a post office and ended up dying in a martyrdom of British bullets and fire.
The poet, W.B. Yeats, reflecting on the shock waves the event created in Irish
society, wrote the following: “All is changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born.”
America became terrible beauty, then the bloom came off the thorny rose bush ...

~

After his 45-minute roust, Seth Butler, spurned photojournalist, put his Greenpeace
passions aside over the Salem power plant, and started taking photographs of American
flags. But rather than puffing up his frames with a patriotic fervor, his eye seemed to be finding something else. An irony. A horror. A beauty. A terror. And more than anything else, a sense of alienation.
“For the first time in my life, I was feeling like a stranger in my own country,” he
said. “They basically insulted me. They asked me why I wasn’t in Vermont (which is
where his family lives). I was being very open about the whole thing. I was being very
civil about the whole thing.
“I’m trying to deal with an event, a problem, over air quality, carcinogens, a serious
matter. I ended up being shut down. I tried to work from farther away, and ended up
trying to look at it in different contexts.
“But never did I think that I was going to run into the FBI as a college student.
“This was history. I didn’t want to give up. Somebody needs to be working,
recording. It doesn’t stop, and I’m not going to either.”
Of the flag photo project, a follow up to his season of hope, terror, frustration,
whatever, Butler has decided to call the series “Tattered.”
A terrible beauty was born.

~

During those fall nights and days in Ipswich, I worked the late-night copy desk at
The Salem Evening News. More than anything else, I remember the horrible anxiety I
felt each time the 10 p.m. news came on in the newsroom. It got to the point where I
was afraid to look over my shoulder and at the television. But still, I got all of the
sound. Each night, the local anchorpersons would gleefully report the day’s horrors, the new death count for the Sept. 11 attacks, and, of course, handy health tips for the best way to deal with the anthrax threat.
One night I decided to ask another copy editor, who also lived in Ipswich, about the
“God bless you” guy. He told me a story that I did not expect.
He said the man was a kind of local loony. Somewhere along the line the man, who
had been a boxer but decent civil servant, lost his marbles. Something to do with a
divorce. Figures.
In fact, he had been coming up to people in Ipswich and blessing them for years.
This stunned me. My impression, as first impressions often are, was incorrect. The
“God bless you” guy’s greeting to me was just another day in the life of Ipswich. It had nothing to do at all with the sudden wash of compassion and kindness in American life.
He was always like that.
It was then that I realized this: While everything has indeed since Sept. 11 has
changed, the biggest change of all, the one that I couldn’t detect, was within me.
So, let me just say this: God bless you all, brothers. A terrible beauty, reborn, faded and then became, what?

~

Word on the street got ugly, especially when it comes to baseline of public discourse we reached after the little Town of Telluride raised its pirate flag over the Bush/Cheney impeachment debate.

The street lingo, as it exists online, became particularly ugly, coarse, beyond just polarized. Terms such as "rabid," "vociferous lunatic-extremist fringe group" and "liberal-minded yellow cowards" were thrown at the Telluride Town Council during the summer of 2007 and supporters of the citizen-driven initiative, and that really hurt. Made one want to take up terms like "Bushite," indicating someone with unconditional love for a Texan with millennial zeal in the pursuit of oil-driven global warfare, in order to respond, and honestly, the whole thing could make you feel queasy.
Most thought the town should back off, turn its back on the issue and start waxing up those ol' snowboards again. Everyone should smile and spend a lot more time thinking about improving customer service. That's all. Town Council should change its vote – in fact tear up the "impeach" document, and keep its mouths shut. Forget sending it to a vote of the people, because in this secluded, insulated coven of pinko fringe groupies, we all know how that vote would turn out. We'd only get more nasty treatment, and then they'd all feel more poorly about the war than they already did.
How can anyone, sitting way high up on this mountain perch, ascertain whether the war was bad or good? They seemed to be immune from war up there, too, and a long, long way from the truthiness of our times. Who knew if there were any weapons of mass destruction from way up there. Heck, nobody could even be sure if there was actually any oil in Iraq, either. Local prices for gas indicate there was a shortage, then prices dropped, then went back up, so who knew?
In calling for an impeachment, the town endorsed a long and brutal and quite frankly embarrassing process that, like it did for President Bill Clinton, would simply add an asterisk to the presidential legacy of President Bush, but wouldn't stop the really ambiguous – if yes, unpleasant – things going on out there. At least not right away. In addition, a lot of winter visitors who were at least partially involved preferred to relax from conducting oil-driven global warfare with millennial zeal while they recreated at 10,000 feet. They spent good money for their vampire time, and when a stressful war is going on, finding quality vampire time is worth its weight in Amex gold.
Since Telluride's economy, as it serves the top tier of our society, is often the beneficiary of trickle-down war proceeds obtained with millennial zeal, there was no backing off. Vampire time was sweet (while it lasted).

~

The interesting phenomenon about suicide cults is their leadership, how it reacts to any challenges to their belief system. Due to the blindness induced from being indoors with too much high-octane religious fervor in the room, a demigod millenarian prophet tends to refute all outside input when backed into a corner. Absolutism is the toxin, here, after all. As suicide cults are confronted with more and more contrary information, they become more and more convinced the evil-doing they are railing against exists, and it's the information bringers gathered outside who become bogeymen, or, in this case, "traitors."
This is why the "Bushites," in terms of their lingo, slammed so much bacon from the "traitor" tray during the election. The contrary information became incredibly intense, and so did the counter response. Their reactions became equally intense. At the White House, they were surrounded on all fronts, just like Waco, by Congress, by a whole competing field of Hillarys and Obamas, by a majority of the electorate, by lurking terrorists, by a United Nations worth of nations, too, as well as mad-bloggers, gay bongers and fake news talk-show hosts ...
In the 1960s the radicals all got together and circled the Pentagon by joining hands in order to, supposedly, exorcize the demons within (Hah! Nice try). However, that seemed to be a dangerous move in this case. The Bush Administration, as well as the Bushites, entered into such a strong state of denial, based on the below-the-belt, guttural tone of their "just drink the Kool-aide" arguments,if the White House were circled in that way, the man would press the button, Jim Jones style, just to prove his talking points on the need for global warfare with millennial zeal.

9.12.08




Things to Do in Demver When You're Dad ...
OK, she tells me I don't sit. Like the act of contrition, not Catholic style. Not in this case. Certainly not. But in prayer, meditation, she says. Like a Feri witch. I say, "So, since I don't pray like you, something is wrong? That's my whole problem?" She gets pissed ... But I pray in my own way. I used to blow smoke out to the mountains, like Daniel Rolling Bears taught me, blowing out smoke like a prayer. But I can't see that mountain from here in Denver ... Plus, I do the transcendental thing, like I learned in that high school humanities class when we were studying Henry David Thoreau. The teacher, Jack, looked down at me as we were getting instructed outside of the classroom, right there outside on the grass at Chaparral High, in front of everyone, all the cars going by, a few students, giggling, I guess; anyway he looked down at me and said: "You get it, don't you, the thing" ... and there's this other way, the most important way, that I do. That I have been doing for 33 years, and I'm not going to tell you what it is, because it's mine ... mine only.
She knows. She's the only one who knows.
But I've been sleeping like a mad alchemist lately, or the way they said about Napoleon: only a few hours at a time ... It has become problematic ... I wake, and after I twist myself out of this knot of noir I've been feeling lately when such quick alert comes to me, I go back to the old 'puter and start creating wildly ... If that's the word for it ... finally got another book of poetry out that way ... filed for another 400 jobs ... posted up and played tickles with all of the Masters of the Universe who I find online ... until I get tired again and turn back to bed to sleep, my eyes watery as hell, but I'm way too numb to weep.
Since I'm a cat with sleep apnea ... it's only been my lifestyle for about, say, ever ... I know that's why I know anything about Dante at all, about Milton, or Blake ... because I read them then, when the muses come to visit ... in the quiet of the night ... that's when I summon them for the damn impenetrable nonfictions and the poetry ... which is easier on the eyes ... but I really didn't see how sitting before a bunch of candles, or snorting the incense was going to do much for me ...
But tits and a plastic Jesus! ... Just this morning, when I got up at fucking 4:30 a.m. that I went out to smoke, only to blow smoke rings out to this urban ghetto ... sure, it's nice enough ... there could be worse ... but I don't see damn nothing more than cement and cars and if I had X-ray eyes for about three or four miles to the east ... the cannon of the U.S. Air Force here in Denver ... and the black helicopters, of course ... and I just decided, shit ... I need to pray, like a Catholic on his knees ... so the One can see so those in the middle cannot? ... that can't be it ... I mean, the mere height of the pagan godz can't have anything to do with it, right? ... but because I'm out in the dark, as usual, smoking, blow out to nothing like a prayer now, but maybe a little blue for the new dawn ... and I look up and there's the Big Dipper again ... I've been noticing it a lot lately, pointing North East ... the ladle-handle part, that is.
I look down, there's this dirty rug. I go on my knees, squeaky, one knee clicking from a paper-clip-like inplant, maybe 30 years old now, from football a long time ago ... and I point my head to the northeast and go to the contrition a Navajo de la rodeo-aye-lo! ...

~
A Funny Thing Happened on the Road to Mythville ... As we walk through the trees, let us summon the Muses to invoke their aid for this adventurous song. Yes indeed, yes indeed, in bringing the dark star Merlin with us, we have done he, and therefore ourselves, wrong. For when taking the irrational rationalist out for a stroll in an attempt to justify the way of elves to men, we do our gothic truths deep harm. Although our intent is to be armed with swords forged in light, by the time we get to the gate of Mythville, we are more wounded than whole. Dragging Merlin along is, well, the road to woe.

Sure, at least you get him as the gate, but later you will find wisdom in simply leaving him home. Just as the elves shed their garments and tools of modernity at the gate, guiding sage Merlin, who you thought would give you strength, instead leads you down the path of self-hate. Sure, you at least got him to the gate of Atenveldt, one of the many baronies for the local chapter of some Society for Creative Anachronism, but doing so is liking dragging a chain and an anchor.

The first big mistake: buying him a beer. Since once soused, Merlin is like an old dying dog who growls from the memory of old wounds, and in all likelihood, at his worst, Merlin will bring issues of his own race (he’s black) to the conversation. Yes, he’s a dark star, wise and cruel with the truth, and beaten down in life by the facts of his birth, too. And also, yes, Mythville is mostly fair elfin folk, so there is some truth in what he says. But also true, Merlin has come from the richest and ablest of traditions, from a family of composers, seers and princes. No doubt, this well-bred wizard is also of blue-blooded stock. He has chosen a path of solitude and dark shame as a kind of penance. And of his spiritual path, we must tally respect.

But listening to him as you walk through the woods to the village, listening to him grouse about people he has never met as mere objects of Caucasian vanity, well, it can become way too heavy to bear.

Yes, Merlin is correct: it costs these fair folk a fortune to dress up their mundane lives into something more pleasing to their own egos. But it is also, is it not, better to see the Hopi snake dancers spinning up a wheel, or the Yoruban heirs moving to the talking drum of the rhythm possessor, Dhambala, or the German girls going oompa, loompa with heavy breasts and jugs of beer, dancing to their polka music? Yes, ‘tis far better to watch merlin walk away with his brooding satisfaction that, as he turned his back on Mythville, he had spoken his peace and that you are in some way wiser for it as he disappears, like some limping haint (or hart?), into the woods. And you, dear adventurer, harken and hear: At the gates of Mythville, turn off your clock, or better yet, leave your watch and 21st century con? at home. That is the way of the elves, their scribes, their kings and queens, their bards, and yes, their gnome.

At the gate, as the evening passes into a grander version of the dark, damp cold, the citizens of Mythville gather under the soccer lights of the park. From a distance, you can see the steam blowing from the nostrils of the pikemen, archers and knights as they don their wares of war. With each new attachment symbolizing the armaments of a brutal age, rest assured by the notice: Mythville is a protected place.

The soccer lights glow soft in the mystic (?) as the mundane world disappears.

They bring bags of equipment, lay them in the wet grass, then unload for some kind of post-Halloween feast for the eyes. The terminology for their varied style of dress, even the exact period (sometime between 1200 A. D. and 1400 A.D.) is elusive as is the sense and meaning for all of this escapist activity.

(Meanwhile, outside the gate, I dial up my queen, who said she would avenge my death should my mission fail, or worse, far worse, should a black knight slay me . . .
. . . O Merlin, I miss you now, but of her her, even more, since she is my light through the way of these darkened woods. I have not crossed the threshold either, but now she gives me strength to push on further as I attempt to link up my crop circles on into the American night.)

Here that? ‘Tis the clatter of arms crashing. The clash is on. There is no time to waste . . .

~

Where is technology going? Well, you could ask a number of people in all fields, and you’d likely get a different answer, although the color green, implying nature and more fire with less fuel for yet another revolution, something akin to instantaneous science fiction, as the world slowly moves from monoculture to permaculture, would be the most common synthesis of what people are thinking.
If you asked the person who knew something, quite a bit actually, about technology who had gone away for a while to enter the new city of glittering lights, they would nonethless be inclined to refer to it more in terms of the clash upon their ears. The unbearble noise. The glare, the lights, the strangeness of things. And of course, the smell.
Or you could ask the person living in such a place as Denver with little technology other than a cell phone. If they are lucky. If they are not members of the dispossessed in the long-promised, ever widening digital divide. They might say it’s all they need, that cell phone. But that one thing is being used to try to attain all they really need: such as a job or a way to reach so and so to score such and such ...
You could speak to someone who knows everything about technology in the 21st century. However, they might be difficult to understand since in all likelihood their speech will sound like Martian.
Clearly, better, clearer ways of communication are needed. Efficiency in every category, more Promethean fire with less fuel, machines that think and think green, are needed. They could run by their own volition so man can return to some semblance of balance and spiritual, creative and sustainable growth. The new hunger for tech is headed now in that direction, too, as many of the old alchemical questions are not how to turn the lead into gold, but the gold into soul.
But during a political season and the possibilities of an intensified global war loom, the crystal ball is muddy at best. Or so it seems. If one tries to predict the future by looking at history, you end up with some pretty good answers about where technology is headed.
For example, seasons of militarism have always been the leading edge of technology. The world wide web itself was built for those very same reasons.
Meanwhile, the counter force of cyberwar, disinformation and surveillance are surely the factors to be most felt by the consumer and refugee under such dystopian conditions. Other than the bombs, themselves, that is, more likely delivered by soldiers with laptops than those with guns, we can just trust in the knowledge that the art of war will improve.
Where is technology going? Look at those who developed the web, the brains, the geeks, if you will. Twenty five years ago, when the academic-based internet was being built, it was Dungeons and Dragons players who were leading the way.
Today you could ask them and they would point you to one of their 500 social networking links, perhaps one titled, “13 Aspects of Technology, all of it leading to improved Techno-pop-gnosticism.” Then, they would try to explain the 37 more technolopolitical “proto-psychic stages” to follow. They’d say: “It’s all leading to the planet becoming one quantum, quite convergent tool ... always coming together, then falling apart, but why, despite all of our web hits and faster, ever faster need and desire and ability to get our kicks with just one click, we still don’t know. Perhaps, we know even less, now. Despite our best efforts and examinations and experiments. But, no worries. If the bee in the hive doesn’t know why it makes honey, why should we?”
Or you could ask someone in business, who works B-to-B, who is entrenched in every conceivable technology. However, they would likely not have the time, since they are so busy (to coin a phrase that inspired Google.com) pouring water endlessly into broken vases, trying to keep all of the fires burning. They might be more inclined to simply let go of technology for at least a few days, to enjoy things that either have nothing to do with technology at all, but are, like a fine old motorcycle, quite beautiful as old-tech. Like a simple fire in a fireplace. Or, better yet, in the woods, testing their varying degrees of ability, among those in the group, to remember, exactly, how it’s done.
Of course, most employed people don’t have that kind of luxury these days, as the global situation is calling for increased time keeping the global technology wheel spinning. But trying to maintain the current dependency on the status quo of the monotechnoculture is clearly folly. Looking at it on this date, all we really know that everything could change in a blink of the eye. Because, during the time you read this, it actually did.
Just today, there is a story about a new building, a tall one, that “defies gravity.” Meanwhile, somebody, somewhere is developing a new kind of snowboard to defy gravity better.
But the real word on technology street is about war, not of the usual kind, but the global war to turn all new tech toward fighting the battle of man against nature. A long slow hard struggle to turn the Titanic around. That is, to save the planet. According to a world-class scientific panel put together by the United Nations, the human race can now start enjoying the last days of the ski industry, for example, like the last days of disco.
Right down to the rapidly escalating decrease of snow in the mountains. Word on the streets of science is global warming and its effects are so well past being recognized, it’s no longer hip to say it’s so, Joe. The environmentalists, then, the greens, can keep doing good works, sure, but otherwise, go into transition mode. Intractable positions can now be transformed into a simple “do no harm, but allow for existing energy-alternatives- development” mode.
Time to reassess, to pat yourself on the back. The environmentalists managed to get even the biggest idiots to listen, and their online savvy played a big part. But now what’s need is not to assign guilt, but action. What we are looking at now isn’t convincing everyone trees need to be preserved for mere aesthetic values, but that the ethic now is the avoidance of the global warming effects leading to a red line event, as in mass extinction.
That is now actually the task at hand, according to the word on the streets of pure science.
That’s right. We got the “asteroid is going to get hit us” notice from the U.N., from NASA, from everyone, including Exxon. I say “notice” because this is the part of the movie about human history where Bruce Willis gets drafted, after initially refusing the call, as all film heroes do, and says, “OK, I’ll do it, I’ll join the world army to save the planet using the best of all available technology.”
The local emergency management response for any responsible adult should now include a list for a few things. First, you need to make some sort of announcement to your kids. Tell them “Sorry, we all have to join this world science army, or we are cooked. If we all stopped driving our cars today, if we even stopped heating our trophy home, stopped doing all of the things that made it happen, the effects of the greenhouse gases as they currently exist is enough to raise the seas by almost five feet and turn your futures as video-rock star dandies playing at a venue at any town on earth with a dock and a bay into a precarious – yes, sadly, it’s true my sweeties – impossibility.”
Tell them sorry, sorry, sorry. Tell them, “Sorry but, you beautiful little eagles, it’s time to put the video game down and get back to your physics and engineering and mathematics studies so that you can, as soon as possible, make some horrendous choices in global energy needs, such as gas-fired and nuclear power plants, safer and more efficient for human survival.”
Tell them to go outside and invent something fun, like an airborne nanotech methane eater to make the world sky-woes go away.
Tell them the days of such pleasantries as gravity games are over. Meet the new hip: Wind. Storm. Fire. Drought. Disaster. Catastrophe in cascades … you get the picture. Give them good survival tips for a future world that will feel a little like Venus and Mars, but it can’t decide.
In Colorado, for example, where we sit on enough resources to turn the country into Western Arabia for the plundering of lodes of natural gas and uranium, resisting the trend is not just difficult, if not impossible – to resist is an act of global irresponsibility.
It’s a hell of a thing to get one’s mind around, this paradigm shift of what will be necessary for human survival, but you only have a few days to think it through, tops. Then, soon as you can, pack up the Hummer, drive it out to your nearest drilling rig, and see if there’s anything you can do to make it more efficient, cleaner, better. Say here, have one of our extra Thanksgiving turkeys, all cooked at the necessary temperatures in our big ass ovens. Tell the gas rig workers, “Thanks, next time we come around, we’ll bring you something nice from the Salvation Army store.” Invite them to stay, when they get world-weary as the hours get longer and the daily temperature averages continue to rise, in one of the bazillion rooms of your trophy homes for the weekend.
Tell them, “Sorry, sorry, sorry. We’ll stay out of the way of your siphoning of the earth. Just, in this century, could you be a little more Zen about it? OK, great, thanks. Good luck saving the planet for the rest of us.”
Then it will be OK to ski and dance, a little, I hope. We’ll see how it all looks with the guns and technowledgy gods and cannons during the next big American Revolution in 2012, when it will be yet another time to re-define under great pressure. When we get another big check on the earth, the sky, the seas and all of our technology. When we can look at our tools, our responsible uses for fire, always a dangerous trick for mankind for 10,000 or more years, asking ourselves, did this tool work? Why or why not? Then start that big wheel turning, hopefully by this time without any fuel needed at all, again. For the next generation. A perpetual motion machine that benefits with a beneficial campfire glow for not just one, but all things, all day, and especially, night.

~

“Riot, n., a popular entertainment given to the military by innocent bystanders.”
-- Ambrose Bierce, the Devil’s Dictionary

Just listening to a few lines of conversation from a recent meeting at Capitol Hill’s Gypsy House Café made it as clear as the view of the nearby gold dome could be easily found around the corner, if you cared to walk, that is, or of beautiful downtown Denver, all to be dressed up very soon like a $50 million red, white and especially blue bag of chips — or, if you prefer, the view of the nearby head shop: Re-Create 68 defies definition. Pin down Re-Create 68’s purpose? Try pinning down smoke.
Surely it’s not an organization. Not when its whole raison d’etre is to question authority, which pretty much precludes the act of organizing. Nor, for that matter, can it be defined as a lobbying group, considering that each member seems to have a different idea of what message it’s trying to convey. That is especially frustrating for those among us, especially in the media, who seek easy answers in order to write headlines.
Especially big headlines. Such as “Denver to Riot! See you there!”
Perhaps it could be at least loosely defined as a production company to encourage performance art. The meetings due seem to be, to the great disappointment of those headline writers, and the denizens of the outward blogosphere, more ready to cast protest in the light of a festivarian glee. To those in the middle, stuck in their easy chairs, watching all, clucking their tongues, its members seem to have some sort of common goal that involves getting people to drop out of their 21st century lives in order to come to Denver during the Democratic National Convention and replicate the turbulent druggy-leftist-protest-music-inspired lifestyle practiced 40 years ago.
But really, it’s just a bunch of people who, rather than rushing home to water their lawns or preen in their SUVS in the suburbs ... just not-so-plain folks, controvertionaries, who were actually paying attention.
“Re-create 68 is just a bunch of groups together and individuals. I didn't start it, nor am I a member,” said one of its meeting-goers, Jill Dreier, who is an organizer for the Visualized Film Festival in Denver. “I organize a film festival and used to be part of the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace ... so from those groups, I know a lot of people, including the R-68 folks.”
Perhaps the Gypsy House Café itself offers some clues. Women in hints of gypsy garb, most of it slummed out to the basic tune of what you can now get pretty freely in the resale shops up and down Colfax Avenue, with perhaps a piece of two purchased at the nearby Cherry Creek Mall ... just maybe, maybe ... men in bleak-chic anarchistic looking black T-shirts, short-cropped hair, soccer moms and men in ponytails mix amiably as sitar music plays and members of the Denver Police Department stroll by, unobtrusively taking photographs.
Hey, where’s the tie-dye? What? No one calls anyone a “pig?” Where are the familiar boundaries we can trust, the old division the division between “us” and “them.” Where are the assurances that this is just some kind of cliche. And that, at least, the re-appearance of its roough best to serve as notice that, like it or not, ’68 is back in Denver, perhaps bigger than ever.
During their orderly meetings in the café’s basement, the group’s core, er, “people,” have sought to reignite the antiwar ethos of 1968, organizing events for a “mass mobilization” during the convention. There is no rabble, maybe a ramble of two. But if you really want a rabble, go cover the San Miguel County Commissioners in the high-priced echelons of Telluride for some real gripe and grinners. They seem to be about as radical as the Town Council there.
Anyone seeking a clearer definition might consider visiting the group’s Web site, www.recreate68.org. There, one can learn that Re-Create 68 represents “the grassroots movement opposed to the two-party system,” is a “convergence center for the antiwar movement” and has an agenda that includes everything left-leaning, from fighting poverty to bringing the troops back home. Environmentalism, too, but there’s still actually some faith in politics here.
Maybe you can turn the Titanic around in four years, eight, tops?
Among many, however, Re-Create 68 has become the hobgobblin of dysturbian anxiety.
As a result, the Re-Create 68 people have spent a lot of time lately trying to deal with dissent within their own loose-knit ranks as other liberal groups and activist organizations reject whatever it is that Re-create 68 stands for. That is to say, what the media says they stand for. The scary thing they have to say. The quick thing easy to rail against before you click off Uncle Bill to catch up on some reality TV in order to get a load off and feel better.
All politics is local, ‘tis said. This is no different. Earlier last month, eight left-leaning groups — the American Friends Service Committee, Code Pink, Colorado Street Medics, the Green Party, Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, Students for Peace and Justice and United for Peace and Justice — announced they were splitting with Re-create 68 and forming a new coalition, the Alliance for Real Democracy. Such is the business of politics: Gyres winding in and out.
Re-create 68 co-founder Glenn Spagnuolo said it’s strange for groups to resign, considering that there’s no membership. It’s like going on Facebook.com and quitting one of many groups, such as the Rolling Stones network, to give the appearance you once played for the actual band. The participation from the other groups, he said, has been limited to dropping in on Re-create 68’s open gatherings, which usually draw about 20 or 30 people. For example, members of the Green Party came in a few times, then left, never really got involved.
But then came heap big headlines, assuring stuff to say, hell yeah, the center can hold. But, as far as it goes with the Green Party, or this other rainbow coalition of orgs, mostly driven by pushing for people to come from the outside toward Denver: “They were never part of Re-create 68,” Spagnuolo said. “Their groups reach a different audience than us. There are just multiple coalitions reaching different groups. We think that’s great.”
Green Party chair Claire Ryder, speaking for herself rather than on behalf of the Green Party, said that after attending several meetings she’d decided to stop going because she didn’t feel the group allowed everyone to be heard.
“I didn’t agree with the way they organize, and the name was chosen before anybody got a chance to participate,” she said. “It’s run by three people.”
Again, county commissioner boards come to mind: But it’s really not that simple.
Ryder also said she didn’t care for the way the group’s activities have been characterized in the media. Who would, if you were inside, looking out. Now the members of Recreate ‘68 have to put themselves through the rigors of “talking to the media” training sessions in order to keep from further fanning these so-called fire of Orc.
“The conflict is what the story is about now,” she said. “The big thing is the violent or nonviolent thing. It has been reported in the press that way. I don’t want to be a part of that conversation.”
It is, of course, the choice of the name “Re-Create 68” that causes people to visualize Denver’s streets filled with tear gas and billy-club-wielding police during the last week in August. The resonance to Chicago 1968’s Democratic National Convention, turns out, was a somewhat doubled-edge sword.
And there are those who seem ready to act out such a scenerio. Especially the police, who are planning for the chance to arrest around 3,000 people, and who are going to look pretty damn silly, after arguing for all of that budget money, if they don’t actually fill up that hotel from hell.
If a comment posted recently on a Rocky Mountain News blog is to be believed, at least one person is “Getting ready for the anticipated and promised R-68 assault. Let’s hope the National Guard is prepared to deal with arson.” Arson, of course ... ding dang ... there has actually been no table set up plan made for how to commit arson, the Rush Limgaugh crowd might be disappointed to find.
Such saber-rattling wasn’t even actually behind Apri’s announcement from Tent State University that it wants no ties to Re-create 68.
The group describes itself at Tentstate.com as a “Coalition of Projects in Pursuit of Democracy.”
“We were never a part of Re-create 68,” said Adam Jung a University of Denver student who serves as the group’s Colorado spokesperson. “We severed ties because the media had married us together, and the messaging was incompatible.”
See these words?
“Media.”
“Messaging.”
“Incompatible.”
As in, watch and learn ...
Spagnuolo, however, says the groups had been linked, but there are no money trails here. No special sections to produce. And since the troubles of the world are so diverse, nothing the logic choppers can real get their minds around.
Of the Tent State thing, yeah, sure, not even the left-of-the-left of center can hold these days for very long. “That’s a group where there has been a split,” Spagnuolo said. “There was a falling out, and we admit that. For them to say, though, that they weren’t a part of our effort is ridiculous. They clearly were. They even participated in one of our early press conferences.”
Still, Spagnuolo is willing to concede that the members of Tent State “were drawn in by … issues over name, and issues about how nonviolent we (actually) were. But we support nonviolent groups and we still support them.”
Tent State, of course, could’ve have been accused of casting the some sort of resonating flames from a bad die gone by, the Kent State shootings that inspired Neil Young’s classic, “Ohio,” but who’s counting?
Not the mainstream media. They are always going to glorify the dissent within the dissent, rather than the real way business works under the Golden Dome of Rome: Just follow money, it flows toward authority, to the right. Like the Demos could even think clear enough with Hillary and Obama banging in out, to come up with any comprehensible copy, for say a special section to run in the local state political gossip sheet, the Colorado Statesman, like the Republican party was able to do for its own state delegate convention. Follow the money, indeed ...
Re-create 68 also had been disinvited from using a tent designated for demonstrators during the convention, it was announced at a R-68 meeting in May. But at at Re-create ‘68 meeting, some of that news was regarded with a happy challenge. At least there was something within target range they could actually break through.
Fellow co-founder Barbara Cohen says Re-create 68’s early “successes,” as she put it, haven’t helped its image. That includes drawing the attention of conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh seized on the name, saying he “welcomed” the notion of riots during the convention and was “dreaming” that they’d happen, exclaiming, “Riots in Denver! The Democratic Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats.”
When critics charged that Limbaugh was inciting listeners to riot, radio station KOA, which carries the show, issued a statement saying, “A review of the full transcript from Limbaugh’s show on Wednesday, April 23, shows that Limbaugh was not advocating violence in Denver at the Democratic National Convention, but trying to make the point that if there were riots in Denver, it would hurt the Democrats’ chances of winning the 2008 presidential election.”
The controversy thrust Re-create 68 into the spotlight as the focus of liberal anxiety and conservative glee and helped make Spagnuolo a darling of the radio talk show circuit.
It also has led the three co-founders, Spagnuolo, Barbara Cohen and her husband, Mark Cohen, to assert that the anti-war movement during the breakout year of protests against the Vietnam War is the real source of their inspiration in naming the group.
“We all agreed the name would get attention, but it’s not re-create Chicago ’68, but re-create the year 1968,” said Barbara Cohen, a longtime local peace activist who, with her husband, was a plaintiff in the famous Denver “Spy Files” lawsuit after police targeted the couple as “criminal extremists.”
“We are an umbrella group that is trying to get the other umbrella groups together ... from every political stream,” she said. “We’ve worked with progressive Democrats, anarchists, Green Party members, everybody working together to put on nonviolent events.”
Spagnuolo says he also wishes the media would characterize Re-create 68 not as a group of rabble-rousers, but rather as an alliance of leftist dissenters that’s trying to get the Democratic Party and its presumptive nominee to commit to bringing the war in Iraq to a speedy halt.
The group has recently obtained hard-fought permits to demonstrate during the DNC. During those demonstrations, rather than rioting, Spagnuolo says the group plans peaceful protests of what they characterize as Barack Obama’s “toned-down” anti-war rhetoric.
Spagnuolo says the new tack indicates Obama is moving his political position “more to the center, in order to get votes.”
If Re-Create 68’s most ambitious hope is to denounce Obama’s move the center, it’s hard to believe the group will draw down the National Guard. Nevertheless, Spagnuolo believes Denver’s government is stocking up on anti-riot weaponry and is itching to use it.
Spagnuolo alleges Denver has purchased such devices as a ray gun to send microwave pulses into a crowd, creating an extremely uncomfortable heat sensation, and an acoustic device that bounces sonic waves off crowds to induce stomach distress.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado has sued the city for access to public records related to the purchase of security-related equipment, Spagnuolo said, but the city, “will neither confirm nor deny whether they have purchased these weapons” for the upcoming Democratic National Convention.
In response to a request filed by the ACLU under the Colorado Open Records Act seeking disclosure of the records, the city’s Department of Safety records coordinator, Mary Dulacki, denied their release on the grounds that disclosure “was contrary to the public interest” and because “it could potentially disclose tactical security information.”
Whether or not they’ve been purchased, Spagnuolo says even the rumor of such devices has sent a chill to groups planning demonstrations.
“They are trying to build up paranoia to make people afraid to come out and execute their constitutional rights,” Spagnuolo said. “I think the city should be embarrassed with their actions to date ... It’s going to leave a lasting black eye, the way they view people who protest as a criminal element.”
City officials have attempted to quell this type of criticism by announcing parade routes for public marches and promising to process parade permits promptly.
In a written statement, Katherine Archuleta, senior policy and initiative adviser to Mayor John Hickenlooper, recently stated, “We’ve been working to enable organizations with diverse viewpoints and agendas to have access to a safe and visible parade route for the purpose of public expression.”
The notice coincides with an agreement reached with the ACLU, which on May 1 had filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court on the behalf of groups seeking improved access to certain areas for public expression.
But Spagnuolo, who has been a Denver resident for seven years but cut his activism teeth on the streets of New York, isn’t convinced.
“This city doesn’t want its $50 million party interrupted,” he said. “They feel like this will tarnish the Democratic Party.”
National and local media outlets have been quick to jump on such statements.
For example, in January, 9News political analyst Floyd Ciruli said: “If they actually do turn Denver into Chicago, there’s a very good chance they will turn off the voters. It could be directly counterproductive to what they would like to do.”
Yet, back in the real space of the Gypsy House Café, the only violence under consideration was dealing with Pieface, a relic hippie activist they think might try to hit Oprah Winfrey in the face with a pie.
If Re-Create 68 actually is a front for subversives working under Limbaugh, things must be tougher than they seem in the right-wing military-industrial cabal. Cohen announced to the circle that the group had a mere $1,600 in its antiwar chest. An early plan to have people show their support by underwriting portable toilets for protesters just hadn’t panned out as successfully as the PBS “All Things Considered” had reported. The size ... the size of things ... they are seem to depend upon the distance they are seen from.
But for the geriatric set, the Boomers, who clearly have the practical real world in mind, they clearly have such important questions to ask regarding the survival of the human race as: Has no time been “wasted,” buzzed in some Statesman editor from her office hotbox, stressing in the addressing of the hygienic or other bodily needs of the estimated “thousand to 100,000” demonstrators who actually might hitchhike into Denver in August “wearing headbands, bellbottoms and beads, bearing flowers and protest signs, and taking an occasional mellow toke as they flash the peace sign.”
(That same editor tried to insert those same lines into this same similar report ...)
But it didn’t work, just like the economy, or, the war machine doesn’t seem to work right anymore: Instead, the group discussed presentations, film fests and which bands to book. You know, stuff to keep the people outside the castle walls enterained while the real deals are made at the DNC.
As the meeting broke up, Spagnuolo was asked if he thinks Re-create 68 will bring a repeat of the rioting and violence that gripped Chicago during the 68 convention.
“That will be up to the Denver Police Department,” he said. “Any violence would be at the hands of the Denver Police Department.
“I’m more worried about people being killed in Iraq in my name,” he said. “The local media has branded us (as violent agitators) because it’s what sells. But there’s nothing sexy to report when people’s constitutional rights are being violated.”
And if he’s a radical, he’s an equal opportunity opponent of the two-party system. When asked if he’d also be protesting at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul in September, he said, “I will be if I’m not still in jail.”

~

Word on the street is that this old house has too much snow on the roof, and that it’s sagging now in cold and wet and disbelief.
The icicles are a mile long.
So much snow, the chimney is clogged, and we can’t see out the windows, or across the street.
Yep, the sidewalk talk all about town is all about that vampire five-bedroom black-lit empty trophy shell, all appliances fully hooked up, amped up and ready to go, while this old house has empty rooms, and the snow is coming in still, see, just as it’s coming into your old house, too.
Word on the street is this old house is in need of repairs. It’s tilted from the winds, as well as the snow drifts pounding in from the storms. This old house has rusty antiques, an old well, trees along the corner to hide it away, pristine (as in priceless) mountain vistas, ghosts inside going back to before the day anyone living in this old house could read by electric light.
This old house tried not to be an energy vampire. Failed.
This old house served a mining town, got worked hard as on old boarding house, as a whorehouse, a hospital, as an administrative office for the barons of ore, kept generations high and dry for a century. Saw boom and got busted, then busted out a new boom boom. Yeah, this old house is full of ghosts. Vampires and golems, too.
This old house has a gargoyle on the perch for protection.
Out on the fringes of the frontier, as you might see it, open space appearing, at least, to be undeclared; This old house is on 35 acres, but we don’t see a GPS line and so then we don’t know where property, as theft, begins, ends or starts. Since this old house serves as a buttress to the winds, the gales, the storms blowing from across the southwestern desert lands, the Navajo lands, the great broad sea of sand, this old house has known that score. Holding on.
This old house has held on.
This old house has seen floods. Its brick-made foundations have outlasted those times when the creek turned its fireplace into a roadside stop for a wild down-canyon ride. This old house is on a precipice. This old house overflows. But beauty and being contained within such a high place requires a high price, and since this old house is built within the very web of life, it moves with it, through the seasons, and these days, their meandering, collapsable, incomprehensible patterns chip at the rafters and bend its floorboards.
This old house has seen a lot. This old house has been a ship.
Now it’s sinking. Now the bills are ringing, and it’s too late to turn that electric light off, too late to suck all that heat back into the house.
This old house had its roof blown off. This old house saw helicopters land to unload crews with bombs and tourists and documentary filmmakers, beauty people, Type-A daredevils, rich guys, Robb Report readers, with the full gear, Gore-tex, gravity machines, Navy Seal hearts and all ...
This old house has a pressurized pipe capable of generating electricity right beneath it. This old house has a dusty old Tesla coil in its attic for storage.
Batteries not included.
This is old house is not off the grid. The sidewalks out front have pipes rusting beneath the town street, which are built upon mining tailings, and the road to this house has potholes large enough to be given Indian names like Chipeta Crater, or, for the larger gods, Neal Blue Lake, To-Hell-You’ll Ride Any Further Rut.
The porch to this house has Tibetan prayer flags coming down. An American flag on the window, all torn up, to make ya think of Jimi Hendrix-sized, star-spangled riffs, searing away. No sign on the door, but the door was left open.
It’s locked now.
This old house is moving on. This old house has seen its day. This old house has a leaking diesel tank outside, a poisoned well, no place to plug into e-Bay, and the dogs have been all chased away.
This old house is empty now. Though it saw Valley cows walk across its gateways, presidents and kings on its porch. This old house has come and gone. This old house is moving on. That it, from this point on, the residents of this house have been moving on ...

~
*
~

It takes full surround sound from a booming wall-hung television sports broadcast to admit it, but I would prefer to believe some Mormon when he goes over the hill with some wild tail about how he saw rabbit tracks do so and so and Raja’s giant gait out there, chasing him down, down, down, into the canyon.
Right now I’m in a town with a big dog lean, Ouray, Colorado. The altitude is 7,800 feet and I’m breathing pretty heavy, but it probably has more to do with that half gallon of tequila I drank last night, or the rolling tomb of dread I felt when I saw Barrack Obama up there on the podium in Houston. Yeah, seasick dread. Such a great speaker, so comfortable up there, calm, still, with his big booming hoarse voice ebbing and flowing, in something more rael sang than any Baptist preacher named Jesse could conjur, yeah, I remember them all and get the Kennedy vibe, sure, but this thing deep down inside me calls and all I see up there is a target, our nation being hijacked by the machine and all, and I’ve seen nothing happen over the last eight years to believe something so good could happen to this country, this shameful disgrace, this Placerville of contempt.
So the hounds of Norwood went over the hill and she sleeps in the unquiet slumbers of a bed down the road, believing a simple act of transference, in the form of another dog, would make it better. But I’ve seen the blood stains in the snow. I’ve got this image of western style brutality, the kind that puts scars on cattle, the hot branding iron of truth, of property, of contempt for newcomers, of their disdain for anything that isn’t as inbred as they are, the clan. The question that keeps coming up in my head is where did I exactly come to believe I could weigh in on grazing issues. I have no idea, nor do I care a wit. Yet the big however always is this, if I’m planted on a place where I feel something, I’m going to write it up the way I see it, see, since I can’t abide a lie on this plain.
So Raja goes missing for a couple of days and I can’t stop seeing red. I knew they would come after me this way. I see cold blooded murder. I see my neighbors as part of this crime, and I want some kind of justice to take place. Is that too much to ask. For a dog, shot, perhaps, because it wasn’t where it was supposed to be, but just how deep does the depravity go here. On that score, these hillbillies never seem to disappoint me.
By extraordinary, almost princely right, Raja crossed all borders for dogs in both areas of activity and intellect. Or, at least, perceptivity. He sniffed around the deserts of central Arizona, which is where we found him, a big starved Scooby Doo, with weird assed tendancies to fly away at any scare. Indeed, he was big enough to scare off any animal in the bush, but he was more inclined to run at first.
But rather than go there, into this deep blue monoliquoy about a dog’s life, I’ll just remain content with myself in this coffeehouse in a town with a big dog lean and notice who the early risers are. Those are my people, I believe, and it’s no sweet contentment I’ll ever find with sleep, since I wake each day with a breach-birth sort of panic. The Egyptian myths say it’s the sun Ra that behaves this way. I’ll take the title then and just gloom my way across this page.
The first to arrive was a bunch of politicos, I’m sure, to console themselves with the idea that some old county commissioner crank can lead the way. They can poll up over coffee, seven of them around the table, and espouse their conservative, keep it the same blues, but all I can do is reek from the agonies of the night, the way I tried to drown it down with tequila, but still I see red, red, red, in the snow.
The barrista has left some cheesy tourist oriented video on the television, with some horrible jazz beaming in. Miss the rancor and noise of the Screaming Bean, quite frankly, to this, but there’s also a calm and sense of community that really isn’t all of that much different. People who know each other wave themselves to each other into their days.
When a town is on a tilt such as Ouray I wonder if there’s some kind of gravitational effect of all interests rolling down the street. But right now it feels as if a town at tilt is one to hang in the air with for a while.
The screen on the TV has this cascading waterfall reel playing over and over again. My question is why do this, this, boradcoast, all day long. Can’t they just unplug?
No more than I can let go. Now I’m back in Snorewood, and we have two different kinds of signs planted all over the place. New theories have emerged, and the blood-in the snow images have faded from my tangled mind. Haven’t had any tequila for some time, so it makes sense. Those missing doggy signs have been greeted by kind members of the community who have come forward and expressed their disbelief: Raja is gone.
Acceptance moves in, ya know, and it’s only the empty solace of this page that dogs me now.
The eclipse of the winter season is passed, and things are appearing more clearly to me. Not having that damn dog sure makes it easier to move, but I still rmember that day I woke up in the Tracker, a jeep, with him breathing in my face. Loved that animal. He was the symbol of grace. Two images persist. One, that of him going out the door. I had seen that look before. That don’t think I’ll pay attention to you this time look before. I closed the door and he disappeared into the moonlight forever. Another image: His great gait running across the beach on the Oregon Coast, right up there at the 45th Parallel. He would go way out, maybe a mile away, down sandy, pristine, glassy beach, with great big ass waves pounding at irregular intervals. I suppose we might have felt much worse if a sneaker wave had taken him then. But it did not. And so we have that time to remember. That dog could go a long way fast.