Now that the days of pleasantries are over

At the arrival of the storm, the front door to the second-story condo blew in, since it faced the wind. Giant trees somehow avoiding the axe for a century swayed madly, and to the good fortune of my own little endeavor in empirical science, a string of multi-colored toy balloons (perhaps the casualty of a Latino car dealership upwind in downtown Phoenix) swished across my line of sight, speeding by about one-hundred feet up: a perfect weather balloon. I’d say it was doing sixty (even though I can’t detect the red-shift and all). Conclusion: A big storm was zeroing in on the southwest from L.A., across the great desert through Barstow, but who really knew with this paradised-out moonscape, this maxed out marketplace plain, with its golf courses and manmade lakes and teaming foundations and swimming pools? Could have been enough moisture around to evaporate up enough for a couple of lakes of rain ...
Anything to keep my mind off the cautious company I was living with, who, like my girlfriend’s cat, looked at me as if she wanted me to die. Or rather, for me to go away and let her die. She lived by the darkness of the television light, in gloom, in defeat with self-preservation … a satisfaction of being only minimally depressed within the perfection of her sphere, a void onto itself … in a prescription haze….
Regardless, what the trees lack, the wind whispers. Like a suburban monk, I was, making sure to keep a light touch whenever I touched the landlord lady nurse’s refrigerator as her rayo-light-Tv obliterated the room from it’s darkness, a flickering firelight of cop shows, cop dramas, cops in love, in law … a very strong law enforcement vibe and then yer off to bed kinda light and white noise … And, me, talking about the weather: The atmosphere of the southwestern desert struck me as unearthly, as guided by angels. After growing up there, I didn’t recognize it anymore. There was no antidote for this mercurial snakebite. By the great nimbus beasts that took shape in the late afternoons, the clouds taking on characters with each gust.
There’s the dragon. There’s the wolf. The snaky front with its long tail slouching across the desert, only to explode into a microburst at five in the afternoon. The archangels of global warming in full view, perhaps. About as clear as the chemtrails, also over Phoenix, I’d say. But I’m at a disadvantage. It’s hard to tell anymore what the normal weather patterns are when you move around so much. The sense of something supernatural, as in moving by abnormal physical shifts in the sky, is a feeling only enhanced by being pushed around by the winds in life. I had just come down from Oregon, fresh from a record season for rain on the Pacific Coast. Forty straight days of rain, in fact. A record for January and February in the deep misty wood along the shore that drove men like Lewis and Clark into dreamy depressions, in a place where the local natives thought White Man mad to want to live there, a foul stenching woodsy murk on a tsunami terrorized coast. Where the winds shook the house, but nobody ever mentioned anything about a storm the next day. Where the angry seas at the 45th parallel pummeled the seawalls along Highway 101, threatening to break through its lines within the next century, not to mention the next 10 years. We, Jaimie O. and I had arrived back like refugees, yes, and we never quite got our feet back on the hot cement of Phoenix, either. She called out to the sea when the storms moved in, in full fury, to Tiamat, to the lost Gods of the beaches, worn away, keening into the wind …
But this sense of disturbed timing goes back further than that: to the fire in the sky. No doubt I was pushed this far by a very last lick of sun that touched the planet. But the first thing I have to say is I had a hard time getting anybody to believe me. Seven years ago, maybe a decade or more, by the time you read this: Our story. The whole thing was too preposterous and prescient and certainly my description of the event as “a lake of fire in the sky” didn’t help at such things as counseling sessions and divorce proceedings. In fact, I had a hard time getting anybody to believe anything I said in those days. Not about the lightning. The polarities. The dot-com bust looming. The bloodbath to come … the one-click wars to come: Ever since that period in 2000, the weather has become preternaturally strange to me, just as I had become preternaturally strange to other people. Something to ignite a concoction in my head. Something without a compass, without a needle to get a handle on. My best friends then, usually women, said I seemed haunted.
Especially after that concurrent histrionic state of mind, due to the stolen election of 2000. The country had been hijacked by a band of Skull & Crossbones pirates. By 9/11 it was clear. Anyone could see. I lost my job. Got a divorce. Refused to own a driver’s license. Tried to get off the grid. Ran into the Colorado Rockies dreaming of same fabled web site to make it all ring clear, then ran back to Boston in time to find the world at war, a nation pumped up by its delusions, shadowboxing with an idea, an ancient Christian foe as old as the Crusades. When the solar storm hit New England in the fall of the year 2000, in fact, most likely a series of storms, it appeared to me as having biblical portents, but denial in those days of the Y2k craze was strong. The world had just moved on. Any prognostication about the dark days ahead was met with derision by co-workers and family members. It was the holidays, after all. Nobody wanted to think about it. The election had finally done the work of a global stun gun. The wrath of God stuff could be safely removed to points of conjecture in the land of god and cannon, and thus, put off for until now as back story spinning out of control.

Okay, let's set a few ground rules. First of all, this living novel isn't going to be one of my long sad odes to lost love. Nor do I make much of my own apocalyptic furies anymore. They are merely observations now, after all. Looking for something a little more life-affirming despite, as I said before: The forty days of fire, forty day of rain. Perhaps if I explain these places, these hard-weather haunts I keep finding, and how the storms swell in myself, we might end up with some kind of real interesting nature study. Let all of that stuff wash this planet clean, I say. Good riddance. Nor is this series of honest entries going to be overly metaphysical. I know, it can’t be avoided. As the metaphysical blends with the physical, as it always has, we can at least grasp all things as one whole, and leave it at that. All religions are one, Blake said, and that shall be the central core of the moral code here, but I'll add that science can be combined in the Tao of that diagram, too.

That being established, the real meaning behind all this is the essential idea that global warming is a proven reality, and despite the fact science has yet to confirm it, we can rely on our own empirical experience, our subjective sensitivities, to guide us. Any animal has this power. We humans shouldn’t deny it, either. Our instincts are telling us everything we need to know. Feeling shook up? Sure you do. If you don't, well, aren't you lucky. You must live in some high-class castle somewhere, insulated, numb, actuallly, with a bank account growing rich from the pilfering of the globe and its underclass of citizen servants to the machine mind. I know, you smile, in social Darwinist glee, don't you, thinking there’s nothing but money that flows like some kind of river or holy ghost that dictates the true realities of the global engines, and all of the rest of us, with nothing but spirit to hone, are just flapping around in the narcotic gods of our overactive imaginations.

Okay then, you have your reward. Drive your Hummers into the sunset with glee. Carve up the valleys and canyons to your hearts’ content. Vote red. See red. Drain blood. Drill. Drill. Drill! Carry your U.S. Marine guarded pallets of cash up and down the streets of Baghdad like a parade of caskets, for all I care. You have your reward, you fucking vampires! What do you know about the weather? I know that it passes through me, over me and, in some cases, below me. That’s all I know. The only real “touch” I’ve been granted. Science, of course, addresses the evidence differently. In a supposedly objective way. Not so angry. More reserved. Cool. Feeling from the subjective, I can say that what I know about the weather, and what I feel, is all that I need to know.

Though my senses may betray and my emotions may swell, I know my personal track record is better than your best satellite. They say our primordial instincts, though dormant, are intact. The eye in the sky uses science, but even old Horus lacks the local skills to reach the conclusions of verifiable evidence that yes, it’s raining, yes, it’s a hurricane outside, and so on. But these are conclusions we are already able to reach by looking up into the sky, opening our eyes, taking a breath, and catching the ill winds that blow through all of us now, at one time or another, for an unlucky many on a daily basis.

The scientific process, whatever it takes to get theory ratified into human understanding, will not help us now. We must rely on our senses, now, or the situation looks terminal. Sure, life will adapt. For example, you might live in a condo in the future in, say, Carlsbard Caverns. Certainly, Carlsbad Caverns, though I have never seen it, scientifically speaking, I know it must be a beautiful place. Yes, we humans have always done well in caves. Caves are consistently good for being safe from, say, tornados. The attendant rain my eventually reach you, but as far as tornados go, you’re good. They provide excellent cover from the cold, and yes, the heat. It’s nice and cool down there in those caves. You might like that fine.

Scientifically speaking, I don’t know much about the Kyoto Protocols. My knowledge is based on hearsay. Certainly, here in Arizona, as it is for the rest of America, there is no evidence of any kind of Japanese-hosted global protocol, unless you count Toyotas. Otherwise, the air is dirty as sin. In this valley, I choke on the dust, and it really cramps my smoking. My senses tell me the air is dirty as sin and sin is disorderly, to say the least. A protocol implies order. There is no order here, sir.

~

This day in Phoenix began with a large Latino demonstration against some kind of proposed state legislation that, to hear the agents of La Raza describe it, sounds like some kind of Nazi pusch to rid this place of more than half of its population. On a fine March day, 20,000 citizens of real actual America, most of them more than likely so-called “illegals,” showed their faces at 24th and Camelback to create the largest mass demonstration in state history. Throughout the day, all traffic in Phoenix was ground to a halt and consumerism took a heavy blow, as a result. I saw a parade of little Latino guys pushing those musical ice cream carts up and down the street, and thought I caught a whiff of ricin in the air while trying to negotiate it all in a white rented truck, my nerves of heightened alert, but actually it wasn't too bad of a day to find Phoenix: A bundle of nervous polarities. I left it that way. Now it has intensified. Figures. But, O my sweeties, how it made me forget about the beauty of the craggy California and Arizona desert I’d driven through. It made me forget about the little burghs of trailer parks, tire fix outlets, shanty little restaurants, and that whole weird world of citizens who are off the grid in the deserts of America. We can only imagine who they are. Who we are. Good people, mostly, since most people are basically good. But we must be an anti-social bunch. If anti-social means avoiding the streets of Phoenix, though, then I can certainly relate to the gripe.

Anyhow, the transition from the coast of woodsy Oregon sure made the clean-as-a-whistle resort marketplace in Sonora seem more moonish than ever before. And that’s the situation with the magazine business in Phoenix, all expressed oh so confidently by the editor of a local fashion magazine, who was trying to elucidate what kind of fill goes between the ads at his publication.
Print journalism in America is so far removed from the First Amendment it can scarcely raise a mute defense against “surface, wallpaper.” The skin-deep marketplace dictates all. Economic forces shape the printed word in order to appear before the overpopulated media frenzy to promote “surface, wallpaper.” And my career? An attendance at the end of the age of newsprint, a more sophisticated form of wallpaper. Thin pages of paper, papyrus, as rendered originally by Guttenberg, then Hearst ... over. Like wall paper burning off the screen for the opening of “Bonanza.” My first thought, immediately looking at the “wallpaper” round the offices of the magazine, tucked into the rococo renaissance of gilded logos at the Esplanade, where even Donald Trump gets shown the door, was to ponder what kind of lives go on there for those covered in wallpaper. If I cared to take the time to do a study, I would examine what kind of flora adorns the Esplanade: As above, so below, the sages say. The desert has been eradicated for many miles, and so this shiny coated surface is a curtain of death, the death of the printed sheet of paper for the purposes of print media, for all I can ascertain. The “surface” and “wallpaper” represents everything sucking the planet dry, and the planet, sucking back, has decided to claim print journalism, through the untimely appearance of turmoil in the real estate industry, one of it's first victims. If you had read this far, certainly, you need little convincing of this: An electronically charged posting. But it’s worth railing on, all the same. That’s because behind it all, there’s something to live for. There’s something valuable to know behind the notice that you can’t drink from fountains, but hey, bottled water is still freely available. There’s something valuable in casting a review of the song cast by the Vampire, who’s sucking sounds ring loud and clear, only to be filled with endless port thirsts worth of water, all being poured like the waters of Google myths, by vases into cracks in the earth, a mystical sentence then, for endless words disappearing beneath the land ... a sacrifice to the god of information.

The Biltmore shopping mall, across the street, is one big mirror to the surface and the wallpaper. Notice the mall-dressed manikin chicks as they glance at themselves, half secretly, in the window shop reflections. To see my own reflection is to live in a kind of torment myself. I can't even laugh at the shallowness of “surface, wallpaper,” if that’s all I’m looking for. So trying to figure out how to fill in the spaces between the ads is a pretty pointless event, I see. Anyone with a global conscience is going to feel that way, if asked to observe the surface of high-end consumer paradise, and by swimming in these dry environs they will no doubt be likewise lost in the despair, hopelessness and banality cast by the controlling mechanisms of the ruling caste. You the one, the order of the Red, which made a brief goodbye at the nearby Biltmore Hotel with John McCain's capitulation beneath the starless of skies of Phoenix by November, 2008. But still ... the Vampire sings: “Think surface, think wallpaper.” All platform surfaces are even, yes, safe for high-heeled beings, but there is nothing eternal about the surface of concrete. And this is really, really valuable to know. Because the days of such pleasantries are over. Nothing left to do now but see what the most Dangerous Creatures on Earth will leave on the silver plate after they are finished with their feast. Forget about trying to keep up by putting on new Euro-trash clothes (to feel better ... free) Forget about getting a free drink of water. Realize that if you are thirsty, you can always slip into some men’s room and cup your own hands in the sink, like Pilot, I guess, and drink from the basin bowl of “surface,” enjoying the “wallpaper” as you blow your hands dry on the electrified blower (this is the desert, there’s not a free water fountain within 10 square miles; and you would think we could save the juice and let ourselves dry naturally.
Somewhere in the Middle East there's a bunch of crazies dreaming up a way to crash this surface and burn the wallpaper. But they are no better than the guys dialing up dollar digits to make sure the enemy surface, doesn’t gain supremacy so that they, themselves, can cover it with their own name brand style of “wallpaper.” So sip from your tippy cup, sweet babies, and hope you are born with the right pattern and style on your faces. The days of such pleasantries are over. Tip the cup of vampire blood for just one last great sip of the concrete basin. Drink. Drink! Your mangled engines may wine and dine, and the pretty glossy sweet dallied lies may glint for a month on your tabletop surface, but seek no truth there, just empty descriptions of “surface, wallpaper.”

~

If the week began with the planet Mercury going into retrograde, and with my own knowledge this meant trouble for communications and all ars technica, well then, that would have been enough. But to see and feel and interpret this phenomena, powered by the solar winds permeating the earth, so often, well now, this is certainly an item for more research.
If you had told me January 1, 2004, that August 14-15, 2004, would be like a summer day in Boston or San Francisco, well, I would have laughed. I am not laughing now. The solar winds, perhaps the very eye of Ayer beaming in on us, are blowing more holes through this thing called human technology by the hour.
Take, for example (since all journalism is local), by complex swimming pool at Tatum and Bell. As I mentioned before, on Saturday morning it appeared to be losing water at an incredible rate. My assumption had been that the wind and the sun had been the culprit. But now, I have determined, the pool pump has cracked a leak, and despite all of my efforts to rescue it like some fire team on a U.S. Navy destroyer, going so far as to even buy a garden hose (I have no garden) to refill the pool, the whole damn problem is much more associated with something akin to a broken heart.

On Saturday night, the pool was bubbling up oxygen like some foul sulfur pit. This morning, the same, but in the light, it looked and felt more curative and pleasant. Great whooshing bubbles would come up from the bottom of the pool as the pump, with the help of the fresh blood, tried and tried to adjust. At this point, after informing the pool authorities about what is going on here, I think I have mastered control of this nature. For a while, though, I almost could believe that the pool, like Gaia itself, could heal itself. But it cannot. Why?
It is dying of a broken heart. So, take this metaphor, dear readers: You want the planet to heal itself? Then stop breaking its heart.

~

Today the observations are as follows: The planet is melting. As foretold, the humidity comes first as the polar ice caps melt and the polarities of temperature and moisture ... no need to write formulas for you. Outside this morning, despite cloud cover the day before, the pump for a large swimming pool was sucking dry after several days of intense sun. August is always that way in Phoenix, but what was different on Friday, August 13 (Jacque DeMolay, thou art avenged), was this: A dust storm tearing across the Valley at 2 p.m. Weather man was a tad startled. These are his perfect days. Face time with his public to explain strange storms, fires and double-dipper hurricanes with triple-digit winds.
Cannot say I feel too bad about Florida, though, surely, many of those who suffered had votes that went uncounted in 2000. The remaining dimpled chads have blown into the Atlantic by now. Time to forgive. It is not for us to determine punishment. Although, I must say, we don’t need no God to punish us, no Malkuth to fly us away now from the Sun, no: I say, we do a perfectly good job of punishing ourselves. Anyway, this is about metascience. Keep all politics aside. Except for this: Please, before we all burst into flames from the mere humidity and pressure. Heap big storm in the Valley of the Sun on Sunday night. Me see um fire in the sky. Thunderbirds in weird mood swings. Me take Valerian to sleep. Noni for clam. The animals awake, confused. Clocks all set wrong. The large buildings of the Biltmore quad took all the hits. Tall boys doin' us big um favor. The sun rises high and hot and fast today. The morning is a beam ...

Click-Clack-Paddy-Whack Meets Jack Kerouac on the Mer-O-Wac
The scene: In the imagination, but with combat boots on the soil, clearly, lugging the laptap across the land. Just out of lunch after getting my Chinese fortune cookie from this downtown rough spot in Lowell, Massachusetts, too dumb to realize I was doing the historic Jack Kerouac tour in some crude way, since he was born and raised in this half-priced-on-everything, that is, everything turned into a pawn-shop-of-a-New England industrial town. And I certainly don’t remember or have the cookie fortune now. Then when I stumbled upon a commemorative site, a classic red-brick river-walk territory of the National Park Service, or at least this part of town near the Merrimack River seemed to be, I stumbled upon the Jack Kerouac Mational Monument, or perhaps it was just a shrine, who knows? It all seemed very official. Paid for. Looks a lot like Stonehenge. With big horizonal cement slabs in half circles, trees growing old and wise. Worthy of the full respect of everyone. It was the year 2000. Bush had just been elected.
I’d gotten there how? By train out of Boston, I guess. I pulled a folded pouch of black, white, quite stained cloth from my backpack. I set it on a cement bench with various notebooks of poems, a backpack carting the PC, a compass, business cards, collected media, small piles of books for sale, a carved wooden “eagle” and, gotta have it, the Mythville logo, which is the image of a steer skull and the words Mythville.org, my brainchild just coming to being. An adaptation from a Georgia O’Keefe motif (traced it from a drawing myself … a red, white, black deathly image … when a friend saw it he said, “How unfortunate.”) But at that time, for myself, it said it all. Or so I thought. Really, the logo was just a “A premonition of anthrax,” I can now chuckle to myself, in the Mythville of my mind, on how that logo was devised nine months before September 11, 2001, but only a few weeks, if that long, after December 13, 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled all Floridian dimpled chads null and void. That’s the kind of humor you find now. The ironic kind. With saturnine subtext. Oh well, satire never plays fair. All we really knew back then, the witches of Essex and myself, was there was going to be some serious hell to pay. “Some serious action,” this bizarre historian landlord in Ipswich would say, a year later, after the World Trade Center Towers were taken down. And the logo, the dot org, a network of one? What a gag! A serious non-prophet action, yes it is, yes it was.
Oh yeah, the scene, again: the Jack Kerouac shrine in Lowell, Massachusetts. Right by the river. Betwixt the satanic red-brick mills. The site is chosen now, for examination, because just eight years or so ago, as I write this, sometime after the so-called “election” of George W. Bush Jr. as national executioner, and just prior to the dawn of the new century, that is, January 1, 2001, I had accidentally found this place. Or, since there’s no such thing as an accident, it had found me. There I was, in a Chinese food restaurant in downtown Lowell, after coming out of the “T” station (Yes, I can see it, hear it now, the Dr. Sax sound echoing in the Lowell railway terminal, right along with the “On the Road” mementoes … and me regularly lugging it all over to the city center because, hey, it was something Kerouac would do. To see a woman. A witch ... to have her … should have saw it coming …. I didn’t really have that thought, however, until I opened up my fortune cookie and realized, like I say: I was “On the Road” to Mythville, on the way to the so-called Blakean “Palace of Wisdom.”
Yes, yes, certainly, it was a road of excess ... I just loved to wander all over New England, by car, train or, at best, by foot, to let the thickety mysteries of the Hub, for this transplanted Arizonan, find me.
So then, from downtown Lowell, I just got up, and started walking toward the Mer O Wac bridge, toward the home of this earth woman, a graphic designer and co-conspirator who had agreed to create a logo for the self-publishing effort ... the mission ... she had long flaxen hair, long flaxen body, as well … could it be an accident? Finding that place. Along the way, wham! A moment of complete synchronicity. I walk right up to the Kerouac shrine. Ker O Wac by the Mer O Wac. Never even knew there was such a thing. A veritable stonehenge for the New Journalism.
So now, the coffee is ready. Time for the imaginary press conference. The pouch, a pirate flag unfolded and draped over my shoulders, like a cape. An act of bizarre eccentricity worthy of a Lord Byron or Robert Bly. There are imaginary snickers all around, and I stand (the performance artist) on the cement benches there, part of the circuitous shrine, with big stone slabs circling me, each with bits of Kerouac’s writings, his poetry … imaginating a bunch of nobody listeners around me, listening to me, nobody, signifying nothing. I light up a cig, an Indian bidi, blowing out the smoke for effect. To make it worse, I stand on the center stool of the Kerouac shrine, and my voice begins to boom as the sound waves bounce around within this literary circle, standing on this sorcerer’s stump: "Click, clack, paddywhack, I just met Jack Kerou-oooooouuu-wack! Right along the Mer-O-Wack, the mighty Merrickmack," and so on, with nobody around to listen in, nobody to say, “shut up” … or, “I knew Jack Kerouac, and you ain’t no Jack, Jack.” Those not in audience, the members of the nobody press, would’ve just whispered sour nothings and giggled, but with the acoustics, if they really had been there, could hear the other: “What a piece of work! Standing on the shoulders of this giant, Kerouac! Indeed!”

~

Where am I now, or that is, where do we go? Nowhere, so much, because at the end of it all, it exists in each and everyone’s mind. The Road, that is. Think of it like the impossible endless search for the Holy Grail, negotiating the storehouse of each person’s personal mythology, where all of their angels and demons live. It’s the shining city of light. A place the imagination (and therefore the soul) can go into infinite directions. Just on the edge of touch, but certainly not your mind. For some people, it’s a whole barnyard of beings and deities, gods and their avatars. To meet the Ethereans, perhaps, at first. To ask for their guidance … all quite within the literary tradition of summoning the muses … yes, yes ….
There’s a code for this quest. Comes in handy. Comes in studying the land, the symmetries of it all, the way the old Freemasons even lined up the old North Shore lodges, leaving clues in the aging stone bridges crossing the river in Haverhill, Lowell, North Andover … Ah yes, code is law ... just follow the sun east to west, note the charted streets, the compass-like points of civilization. The passwords are being all handed out now, then, to all of the nobodies there. Indeed it is. Just like the Da Vinci code, too, but in this case it’s a real story of that search? Some of it perhaps. But it’s all a lost doggy story, too, really. Of a borderline perp trying to find his own little lost doggy. Yes, yes … explains the pain … the loss, the endless searching .... You do need to be able to work your machine to get to my machine and then download either an e-book or print-on-demand book, or fuck’n’hell, just read my mind. It’s all tipping over now … pouring out.
So the code is the computer, the ghost between the digits one and zero, and all of these digitized geeks, who like to read about wizards, the enviro digeratis, the online sorcerers, all of those not in the audience … except, perhaps, as, well, kind of personal pathway: The road to superinformation. Like Blake said, “The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom.”

~

The road could’ve begun, a ticket for a tricked up mule born then bought on the Smolak Farm in Andover, actually, when I had a long discussion about rabbits. Actually, books with “Sully,” as in author William Sullivan, who wrote numerous short, somewhat quirky, oddly sinister children’s books. It was the fall of 2000. Election day was looming. It was a beautiful day. Picking apples, wandering through the trees, picking a pumpkin with my little girl. Talking of wolves and rabbits. Then I met “Sully” and saw what he was trying to do, and is still doing, writing fairy tales about rabbits and a whole barnyard of his own characters. I was the senior editor for Access Internet Magazine, with its 11 million readers, weekly, another kind of content farm, and I suddenly realized the connection between the mythological constructs of William Blake and the hierarchical order of the online, and therefore, real world. And more than that, what it might mean for a self-publisher of numerous, smaller, shorter, more digestible reads. In other words, making e-books, William Blake-style. Some dumb idea, huh?
But, actually, the experiment in experiential literature all started,
also, with a pirate flag. That is really the crux of the whole thing. That was my first logo. The Jolly Roger.
What kind of Peter Pan fantasies are we talking about here? Now? No, that’s right … I remember ... That medium was the message. The pirate flag was the crux of the whole thing, the Skull & Crossbones vibe back then. A kind of upgrade from the X-files journey of the 1990s … the pirate flag … the crux … the whole thing. Oh well, maybe I really should backtrack? Provide even more back story before the Bush era even begins? When moving through a lot of the ephemeral stuff quickly, we are well advised to keep the mind still and the eyes sharp. The truth will fly right past you.
Okay, so there’s the election. I voted for Nader. Who knew? Then, this long period of a couple of weeks, then a month, then six weeks of nobody knowing who the hell is in charge anymore, right?
Then came a solar storm … A solar storm hit New England. I looked it up. Nobody believed me, except for a lady in a gas station pay counter near the freeway in Andover. A lake of fire in the sky, over Lawrence. I thought the whole place was ablaze with lightning. Yes, yes, that was the first day of forty days of fire that I can count, forty days of rain …

~

Look it up yourself, a freak solar storm hit New England, the whole earth, really, from that point, sometime between the election and December 13, 2000. Apparently, it was the end of a 13-year cycle of unusual solar activity. My theory is that it sent vibrations turbulatin’ on into the very core of the earth. I was certainly feeling them: After the Supreme Court had ruled to decide the election, I just broke loose. I wanted nothing to do with this country, or, any other. It was as if a bolt of lightning had briefly lit up every one of our institutions and revealed, for just one brief flash of X-ray, every one of our major institutions as faulty, frail and hopelessly corrupt. For me, looking at it from the dark, wintery, London-esque Mordor of Boston, one big, giant, monstrous … well … one big complete bogus ... Mythville. Not that there was much of an audience for this kind of publishing, expression, through the blogs and so on … a specialized audience, indeed. Audience? At that point, I was just one guy with a blogger … A voice crying out in the wilderness …. Yeah sure, that’s what we all believe, but like the ancient Google myth, it’s really just endless pourings of pitchers of water into a crack in the earth, an attempt to cool off the planet, or heat it up, who knows? … So, as my world was coming apart, and I was determined to tap out of the system, especially creatively, in pursuit of this self-publishing, self-expressive dream, I decided I needed to network with like-minded people.
So, what I did was …. And really, trust me, I’m not this person anymore … I took the pirate flag, which I intended to give to my future-ex-father in law for Christmas, and I hung it out to flap in the breezes on the front porch, right out there to challenge the American flags, innocuous sailing flags, and so on … for whatever reason, people in New England alll have flag mounts on their porches. I wanted to signify to anyone who might get the code: Panic! Panic! It’s time to take action. It’s time to be a pirate.
But action came from unexpected quarters: My wife threatened divorce , then followed through with those threats. My in-laws, Sicilian mob-style, tried to get me kicked out of our place there in North Andover. They called the cops. Stirred up the neighbors. Threatened to send thugs over to kick me out. Took the family car, a kind of wedding gift, away, leaving me wheeless. Once, when I had left the home, they snuck into the basement and pulled out all of the fuses, leaving the place completely dark. I guess they figured I would never be able to get the old place back up and running. In fact, I’m pretty damned good with matters electric. They called the landlord and said I was burning candles in the house and leaving wax all over the place, like some kind of creepy Vincent Price.
O sure, there were candles … Yes, but I only burned them at dusk, as a ritual before more writing and blogging and so on. I was in mourning: Look, I'm not saying I wasn’t getting a pretty weird ... approaching the borderline … yes, well past, already, by the time I … I was just expressing the anxiety and turbulance I was feeling all around me. For God's sake. It was the year 2000!
Since both misery and mystery love company, some pretty cool people got curious about what I was up to, and started to come over to the house. I’m sure this sudden new type of gathering in the neighborhood only served to stir things up even more. By this time, the North Andover police really wanted my ass in a sling. One cop, a long-timer macho kid, who lived as a townie all his life, came over, and asked me, after I smarted off about “search and seizure” and some such lunacy, he asked me if I was a lawyer. I said “Yes, I went to Harvard law school.” It was true. What I didn’t say was it was only for one day to attend an Internet-related conference on MP3s and Napster. Anyway, I was obviously going head-to-head with the Gillette crate-packing mentality around there.
That’s when I really started to meet the witches of Essex county, too. They would come over, hang out. I would play loud music and try to describe what, exactly, was going wrong with me, trying to gert off medication I had been prescribed for my ADD … and they’d get to play the healers …. People from a salon in North Andover. In fact we had designers, Webmasters, entrepeneurs, like-minded folk came over, too … but there was a strong New Age vibe …. This Reiki therapy trainee came over and practiced on us, for myself, something of a hallucinatory experience. Was it Mesmer or was it Memorex, who cares? It was a real salon, Parisian style, and I was that cat Cagliostro. Or, at least one of them: the millenial metrosexual man. It only lasted for a short while, though, a few weeks at the most ... it was short-lived because I had decided to get out of there. The Sicilians around the corner, my former New England family fully militarized against me, were getting to be too much …
The whole plan was to end up in Telluride, Colorado, writing my tales from my heart-home, anyway. So with so many problems for me in the neighborhood, my pending divorce, and all of the lousy bitterness and stupidity that entailed, I decided to leave, going back to my friends in the mountains of southwestern Colorado. From there, at about 9,500 feet in altitude, I launched the first incarnation of my brainchild, my Frankenstein, my personal obsession, this text, my message to you, dear reader … and Bush had just been elected … the dot-com bust just a few months away …
Then, I lived in Telluride for a year, then came back to New England, living in Ipswich this time, in order to clear up legal stuff related to the divorce. But right as I moved back, this time to Ipswich, September 11 changed everything. I was living in Concord, Massachusetts, home of the first “shot heard ‘round the world” on the day of the attack. All I can most clearly recall is the complete silence of the skies to the east, over Boston, where the hijackings and subsequent attacks had begun.
I moved to Haverhill because it was cheaper, times getting tough, setting up a small metamedia bookstore right there on the street. And, of course, I always put my pirate flag out on the window to attract like-minded people and ward away the foul spirits, too. Artists. Writers. Programmers. Scammers. Lunatics wandering that unwalled insane asylum called Haverhill. Perfect town for people with Peter Pan fantasies in their heads. Lot of Captain Hooks floating around up and down the main old downtown quad, home of Arichies’ Comix, Viet Nam war vets, most likely … up and down the street drinking beer and me bashing away on my laptop in the Irish bar downstairs. I loved that place. A writer’s place, that bar, for this message to you, dear reader.
Please keep on, see … I almost starved. Trying to sell e-books and print-on-demand poetry is not, exactly, the stuff of commerce, you’ll no doubt find. You can only go so far with a pirate flag in your shop window, as well. But the public doesn't give a fuck about even the shadows flickering on the wall anymore. So until they do, it’s to thine own self be true, with time still to hope everybody else eventually realizes the only actual political boundary, that of Gaia, is both rock, living and atmospheric in nature and moving, through space, on the moment at perilous speeds ... the road going onward … the little doggies as lost as ever … and the weather spinning madly about … heated by the undulating currents beneath the overheated earth …

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.

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 ...

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.