Pilgrimage II

The car kicked up no dust. Thick bedding of gravel groaned under the accelerating vehicle plowing towards the gate. Despite my efforts to keep up, the car was escaping. My legs ground into the gravel and my lungs sucked hungrily at my throat. My sides were on fire. The girl and the boy stood still and white against the rich chocolate clay of the fields. They could not move without me. The car could not avoid them. The men would get out of the car and murder or torture my charges. I had abandoned them to the forces of the authorities intent on killing us three. The gate opened for the car and slammed shut behind it.

I ran up to the gate, climbed it, and cut myself open on the cyclone wire and jumped over. The boy and the girl were occulted behind the white car that was now parked. The doors were hanging open with well appointed, but entirely gray men exiting the vehicle. The well dressed and manicured set of ghouls were moving around to the front of the car. I picked up a fist sized boulder and ran up to the first suit. He turned his face, or where his face should have been, pale and gray, toward me. I leapt on to him and choked him with one hand and battered the side of his head with the rock. Without any resistance or fighting back, he fell in a heap, clear blood running from his crushed head.

The commotion had drawn the attention of the other employee. The ghoul pulled out his pistol and began firing into me. Pain seared my resolve into a solid ball in my stomach. I threw the rock into his face and he fell. My momentum brought me to his body and I fell on to him. My fists beat his face of their own volition while he struggled to get up. As his face became soft under my hands, he struggled less and less until he finally lay still. I stood.

The boy took my left hand, and the girl took the boy's right. We began walking to the North. I apologized to them for the abandonment and endangering. They were silent and following. The brown dust rose around our feet while the sky, azure and pristine, shuffled the clouds away, the Indian paintbrush exalted in our survival along the road in minute explosions of red and yellow. My fists hurt, but I never bled from the wounds in my chest.

The laboratory faded behind us into the hills. The walk was long, but we were almost to the river. Beyond the river was the North. Unfortunately, my foray into the parking lot of the lab had alerted the authorities to our escape. The North clouded over and the beat of helicopters reached us from the darkened sky. Under the clouds, forboding and cold, sat an enormous brick building.

As we walked closer to the border, we saw brick stretch away from the building on both sides into eternity. On top of the wall was concertina wire and men with guns out and dogs with red eyes. The wall was impassable. The North had only one way in and one way out: through the building festooned with potlights and sporting an enormous seal above the door. Two lions ripping a man in two underneath a haughty perched eagle were painted in gold on the noble red crest.

Our little troop walked up to the doors, massive steel plates the size of a house. With a friendly ding, the doors slid open for us.

Pilgrimage I

This is a dream I had years and years ago.

I was somewhere in the range of twelve years old.

The sparse landscape of Montezuma County stretched away on all sides. On all sides of the rolling fields of dark brown earth furrowed for the spring's beans, the mountains framed the surreality of the fertile valley. The La Platas, the San Juans, the Sleeping Ute, the sheer cliffs of ancestral sea mud to the South showed the gateway to the Great Monument Valley. We stood n a small swell along one of the nameless county roads that belted the emptiness of Southwestern Colorado. If I had to guess, I would say were were around Cahone.

There were two others with me, one girl a little older than I and one boy too young to have been in school. They were my charge. I had to keep them safe and get them north. We had to get to the North where we would be safe.

I walked along the rich, dark road and the way was paved with miniature explosions of Indian paintbrush and sunflowers. They weaved and bowed in the wind as we passed, worshipping the movement of the warm air. The sun was high and hot. Our shadows fell under us and the only shade was from the scrubs of pinon, cedar, and sage. I lead, but not from the front. I was on the right side of the road walking with my left hand taken by the small boy's right. To the far left, the girl held his other hand. They deferred to me, but I don't0 know why.

After an interminable distance over the swells and hollers of the stretching land, we came upon man. Not man himself, but one of his temples. Towering into to the sky with the imposing lack of any aesthetic value was a laboratory. The concrete building was a square but shapeless mass secreted into the open and wild land of my youth by greedy and hungry men. The structure reached into the cobalt sky and drilled into the ionosphere with smokestacks. The parking lot was full of cars. All manner of vehicle was sequestered in the lot surrounded by the high chain link and cyclone wire so in contrast to the simple cedar post and barbed wire that lined the rest of the road.

The wind stood still. The dust that gritted in our teeth settled down, but did not mar the shining perfection of the rows of cars.

Cars have always fascinated me. I had to get closer. I had to touch one and look inside, roll under it, feel the cool, steel skin. I found a gate and realized that the other two, for reasons that are more profound than a simple rule of existence can define, could not go in. They were blocked from the entrance guarded by an empty shack and concrete pylons by something sinister, spiritual. I told them to wait and I would return. I had to see the cars. The gate opened for me.

The cars sheened in the harsh sunlight of high altitude. They were so beautiful. a 1970 Bronco, a '68 GTO, some European contraption with the shape of a woman and the eyes of a dragon, a '63 Ford Unibody F-100. I rolled in the field, bliss found in the spotless chrome and glinting paint. I inspected each vehicle closely. While I ran my hand over the hood of an International Scout 80, the light changed. The sun had went behind a cloud. My reverie faded as I looked up and saw that the midday sun had become a late afternoon. This had all been a trap. There was an ugly, white, shapeless bureaucratic car prowling towards me down the lane of cars. The faceless car was dusty and heartless, owned by the laboratory. The drivers stared ahead, thoughtless. I ran towards the gate.

In the still air, I heard the engine rev and the crunch of earth under tires become steady. They were coming up behind me fast. I wasn't going to make it. They were going to run me down in the parking lot, my blood staining the gray gravel. Then the car passed me. I had not known terror until that instant. My life was not at stake. I ran faster, my lungs burned and my legs protested. Dread realization tore my gut in two. They weren't coming after me.

They wanted the girl and the boy.

Why the Next Few Posts Will Make No Damn Sense

My whole life, I have been plagued by dreams. Not really dreams, but semiconscious and semi lucid scenarios. In the dreams, I'm running from other people. I don't mean running on foot through a crowded mall, but packing up and running off to the mountains or the deserts because the entire force of civilization decides that I am no longer a worthy inhabitant. Often, I have to drag various people, the vast majority women, off with me. Often the dreamscapes are recognizable topography, though sensationalized by whatever mind games I'm running on myself. The mountains will be spired and vertical, the deserts will be scratched open aeolian sandstones and infested with snakes and poisonous lizards.

Even the dreams that are so benign as to escape my memory the next day leave me bruised and scraped from some battle I had to fight that manifested itself in thrashing or waking up with starts. I have been told that I often talk in my sleep. Always directing some nameless group or arguing some passionate point.

There are only two constants in these dreams. One is that they involve, in detail, a vehicle that actually exists in my real life. The other is that I always have to lead, an activity much like The Holy Cross Trail in that it terrifies me until I get my ass out there and do it.

I bring this up because over the next week or so, I'm going to write down the dreams I can remember before they go away forever. With someone there, laying out next to me, I never have those dreams. Someday, I might not have the luxury of these dreams. A warm body next to me takes away all those crazy missions and chases. That is why they are mine and mine alone. As much as I enjoy every sacred, dreamless night I have spent with a good woman, somewhere inside me, I know it won't last. It brings to mind the celibacy vows of Gandhi. He never wanted the love of an individual to override the love of all men that gave him his mission and life's work. Not that I'm pretentious enough to compare myself to Gandhi.

When I see life spreading around the canvas of events, I wonder if I can ever have anyone here without losing my sense of priority, my sense of responsibility to the bulk of humanity. My dreams may be taken away for a while.

Sometimes You Need A Quickie

I know I said I was going to be gone. I lied. I feel terrible about it, but when you look as good as I do in a red microfiber shirt, self-flagellation exudes a pretentious and simulated humility.

Microfiber has a purpose in this correspondence, though a small one.

I needed some pants suitable for physical training. The shorts just don't cut it here in my neck of the woods after September, and my knees are battered enough that cold can be a problem. All Sports Turbo Seven eXtreme Warehouse, or whatever ridiculous name they go by, had the best selection of jogging suits. I needed something simple and, above all, inexpensive. As it turned out, I had no real shopping to do, as my size is always the first one to be snatched away by greedy hordes of terribly ordinary men.

All preamble aside, if you see a man with no hair, striking features framed by the slanting evening sun of the high desert, sweat dripping and sheening in ways that awake parts of female neuro-centers and hormonal distributaries laid dormant by a generation of men who prefer tanning salons and designer jeans, you should not laugh at the fact that he is dressed as if the Bolshevik Revolution vomited upon him.

More to the point, don't laugh at his huffing and puffing from a year of lazy, civilian living.

Honestly, I usually write these correspondences for strangers and acquaintances and friends as a warm up to more productive writing, and as I enjoy outlandish goals I have no intention of keeping, I have a book to write before January.

That last sentence was very complicated. I might just need to go pour myself a glass of something cold, brown, and toxic. On that note, I'll start being productive.

Weekend Update

That post about staying or going was a saved draft from October, thus the angst I think. The reason for all that questioning was the opportunity to voluntarily mobilize for a year. Then I settled on staying, happy and in love with another winter of snow and warm blankets, even if there won't be anyone sharing those blankets.

Long story short, any person ever part of the military knows that they only give you the option of volunteering for so long before you're just voluntold.

Of course, this is all assuming that the way is made straight and the path lit through all the screenings and so forth. I'd give my odds of missing another Christmas around 85/15.

If I'm still healthy when the MED screen goes down, come January I'll be on the East Coast for a couple months and tentatively accepting offers for beer on that strip of salt wash. Hopefully, I'll finally get to see a couple places over there that I missed during my on again/off again relationship with the chowder states. Namely, I will see Philadelphia, goddamit. I'm a little bit of a history nerd, and a little bit of an understater, so Philly has always been on my A list. So was New York, and then I took care of that. Virginia, but I got that out of the way ad nauseum. The Spanish Colonial towns of the gulf coast bear my foot prints. It sure is nice that I'm a history nerd because a couple months after I arrive in Virginia (again), I'll be in the "Cradle of Civilization."

With a rifle.

Instead of the simple, and exponentially safer, detention facility duty that I could have volunteered for, it's looking like I'll be working interdiction in the Gulf. That's where we board vessels and search the ships for contraband arms and so forth. Boarding parties are historically a good way to get your shit dead. All of this begs the question, "How do I feel about all this?"

I wish I had some sophisticated and high-minded word to impart. I thought and prayed, if that's what you want to call it, and the best response I can come up with in regards to this news is pretty much, "Fuck yeah."

Maybe that's why a life of roving and fighting draws me like it does. I'm not saying I want to do it, but I can do it, and very well. That's motivating.

Honky Tonk

The throttle is twisted back to the stop. Screaming demons are at work under me, and a strung out angel is doing her best to hang on. Life is a commodity I do not appreciate fully, and Vulcan, angry angels of death are breathing chemicals in my blood. The four horseman of the apocalypse spin at thousands of revolutions in one of our earth minutes, propelling me at speeds beyond unsafe and beyond unreasonable. Suicidal and stupid would be more accurate. I'm 18.

Back then I had a few good timing friends who were pretty much worthless human beings. Andrew was one of them. The only reason I think we were such friends is that we had a tendency to get expelled from school together. We attended, to horribly abuse that word, a local alternative high school. They didn't like us, and we didn't like them. Eventually, I got in enough trouble that there was no use going back. Andrew met me in the parking lot and we drove off.

We shared several dead end jobs and untold cases of PBR. Our lives were simple and pointless. In retrospect, I don't even understand why we even hung out together in the first place. On the other hand, when you're going nowhere in life, you don't expect your friends to be beneficial to you. We worked the odd construction and landscaping jobs and threw away our paychecks in the bars and pool halls that didn't bother carding us. What was left over of our wrecked economies, I wasted on books and he wasted on swords and knives and other crap.

One summer, we discovered speed. Our lives changed drastically.

I was working a few nights a week throwing freight in a disreputable warehouse and he was selling wire work and bullshit little crafts at renaissance fairs. We were still partying out in the deserts outside of town, souping up our old Ford trucks, and swapping the kinds of girls that go for old Fords and desert parties. One night, we ran into a bonfire party with a warm keg of beer and some seriously interested women. The strung out angel was there, fucked up and dancing to Lyrnrd Skynrd's Simple Man in front of the diesel and pallet holocaust. Our beers were spiked with the strange new stuff and we enjoyed the effects immensely. I have always been told the dangers of drugs, but no one bothered calling the little pills speed, so I didn't know what I was getting into.

Besides blueberries and auburn women, I have no addictions. I never developed an addiction that summer, either. I just used the pills to stay awake or make the party last longer. When I got tired of them and figured out what they were, I quit. Andrew didn't make it out as clean.

The summer ended when Andrew had his picture on the news and a reward for information leading to his arrest. He borrowed my tent and some of my gear and stayed out in the desert with his girlfriend. I would bring him out some hamburger and bread and canned stuff and he would ask if they were still looking for him. We would sit out in the cold desert nights and drink cheap beer and Ten-High whiskey until the sun came up and I had to go to work. That summer, we had found ourselves wrapped up in the cash economy of drugs and parties, and he had went too far and got caught. I had bought a motorcycle. We were just kids, but that winter got cold and hard.

Later, I would memorize those constellations we were staring at and learn many more as I saw a greater selection of the Earth's available view of the universe from the world ocean, the cathedral of father time. But that night, the last I ever saw him or his slack-jawed girlfriend, all I knew is that the stars were beautiful. The strung out angel I had brought with me was inside the tent girl talking with Andrew's slack-jawed girlfriend.

"I'm leaving tomorrow," he said over the top of his can of beer. His face was softly lit by the portable propane grill I had lent him.

"Where you headed?"

"Nevada. I got a friend works the mines out there said he could get me on."

"Think you'll ever be back?"

"I don't know, dude, depends what they'll (he gestured to the glowing city in the distance) want me to do."

I was leaving town, too, but I didn't know when. I didn't know how or even why, but I knew. I predestined myself to leaving. Selah.

I stood and brushed off my pants and smiled, "Well, alright buddy, been fun."

He smiled back, "Sure has."

The strung-out came up out of the tent and shivered.

It ain't something you control. I waved to his girlfriend and jumped on to the red demon. My temporary life-guest crawled on behind me and put on the helmet. I put the bike in neutral and pressed the starter. The four horseman leaped up into a whine.

Stratocaster hearts and hard wired souls. On the interstate now, going home from that desert, I have the throttle twisted back until it wrenches my wrist. De Beque canyon screams by and I'm going way too fast. The speedometer goes up to 140 and it has been buried for six miles. The foot pegs leave a valkrye train of sparks behind me when I cut into the corners. Her head is nestled into my back out of the wind, she's too fucked up and in love to be scared. I won't ever hear from Andrew again, because he wouldn't make it through the next five years.

It's live and die rock and roll.

_________________________________________________

Ray Wylie Hubbard, Live and Die Rock And Roll

Debating

Stay or go?

Stay.

Why?

It's safer.

I hate safer. Safer is the whole problem I've been having.

You hate it there.

No I don't. I liked it. It was a nice place, just sort of hot and dusty. But gun oil, desert skies, men and women who live life, the way the derricks lit up the sky at night, that was beautiful.

It will be another year of school postponed.

True. I don't want to be in school till I'm thirty.

Another year of your life gone.

What life? The life where I scrape and scramble for every little two cent income I can grab and spend every night in my house watching PBS? Is that really something that shouldn't be interrupted?

You could die there.

I could die here.

Why do you even want to go?

I don't. But I have this part of me that needs to go. Besides, they want me. No one else does. They could give me some people who think like me and walk like me. What would that be called, a yearning?

Insanity?

The pay is good. I could really use the money.

Do you remember the ache of being away from all of it?

Away from all of what? I had something to come home to. I had a wife, a dog, a house. I had a life. I had something that drew me home. All that's gone, now. I have no reason to live here and do this anymore. I hate it. I hate the day in, day out bullshit and the Home Depot orange. I hate school and I hate that the really cool people I know are all so far away. I would be able to see Jim, and VA again. I could reclaim that place from Her, and make it mine. I could erase everything and just lose myself in the sand. Again.

This is a terrible idea.

I know. It's only a year. It's only one year.

So, stay or go?

Bravo Sierra Delta

Yes, it is one of those days. BSD Day. Everyone has them.

That term, BSD, goes back to a former life I had. It was a crazy life where rigorous physical activity was combined with bat-shit crazy and rolled around in booze and disreputable women in exotic locales. Bake for eight months at 140. Serve hot in Perth.

I come up the ladder with an eighty pound rack on one shoulder and carrying a fifty pound maintenence box in the other. "We got it, burned relay. Changed it with 3r from 104, knocked down the 138, and jett checked it. It's up and ready."

'We got a warbird, son!"

"Yeah we do, jefe."

"Goddamn, Natural, you havin' a BSD today!"

Side note: every person I have ever known in my old line of work had a nickname. Mine, inspired by the fact that I would buzz my hair down to fuzz every time we went anywhere, was Natural Born Killer.

Sorry for the departure. Ah yes, BSD Day.

Say you nabbed a girl that everyone would be talking about, in a good way, for months. BSD Day. Say you jumped through hoops of fire and managed to get a go up and gone with all manner of challenges to face. You're having a BSD Day.

BSD is about ego, but the kind of ego that doesn't whimper for attention, it merely sits in place staring at the world with one appreciative eye and revels in the world's appreciation of it. BSD Day is the day you walk across the green fields of conquest without stopping for self-criticism.
When you have one of those days where you just feel like running a marathon in your jeans and work boots to show those pansies with the band-aids on their nipples (runners are weird) who the fuck they're dealing with. On a BSD Day you walk a little taller, talk a little louder, and neglect not the oppurtunity to pursue the opposite sex.

There is something aiding and abetting your success on BSD Days. Confidence lights up your eyes and screams out your approach to the rest of the huddled mortals. It's Big, and it's Swinging.

The onset of a BSD Day is usually something that seems a little benign. A friendly game of flag football at Thanksgiving that ends in bloodshed and half hearted laughing apology. Realization of a newly found single status. Realization of a newly found attatched status. Killing something big. Working a composite function the size of Rhode Island with pencil and paper algebra. Concussive detonations and mass conflagration (this one might just be me). The day after you invite the girl over for a three course meal, a little too much good wine and things end predictably. All causes of BSD Days, at least in my own life.

Today, I have:

A) Set the curve in anthropology (paranthropus boisei, bitch!).
B) Rewrote the damn 113 test.
C) Correctly identified the piezoelectric response of tourmaline and indentified correctly willemite, zincite, franklinite, and calcite matrix.
D) Moved over twelve thousand pounds of freight. Over three tons by hand.

Sure, nothing blew up and no one died, or even got all that bloody, but it's all I got right now. And I have to tell you, BSD is in effect. At least today. This might also be the fault of some girl, who knows.

Or maybe I'm just being egotistical. It can be difficult maintaining humility when you are me, but you are not and probably have no idea what I'm talking about.