Flying V's and Charity Work

This post is in two parts. One is drunken rambling, the other a plea. You figure it out.

Subject One:

I have decided to get published and therefore I need an editor/proofreader sometime in the next week or so. I am serious about the proofreading part. I would prefer someone with an eye for mechanics, word usage, subject/object issues, etc. I like my prose the way it is, so I would only need minimal content direction, probably centered around the fact that I sometimes take vague way too far. Pay is not an issue, because you won't be paid. Obviously, this makes it an imposition if you have a busy schedule and I understand. Blah, Blah, and so forth. Anyway, volunteers should contact me by whatever means get their goat.

Subject the Second:

Albert King is cooler than you. Albert King is cooler than most, so your tears are wasted, mortal. On the eighth day of creation the Serpent tempted woman not with fruit or knowledge, but with the subtle sinew of a fretboard burning up the key of Bb. This is not in your Bible, or in some creation legend from the plateaus of shadowed Ararat. Those legends are fine, imperfect as they are.

Eve, Lilith and the tenderized portions of your mind left open to loving the soft touch and vanilla and quince scent of the one woman you never truly got to know sings in round and full harmonics and symphonics. In the raised voice of a thousand parishioners in the Burning Church of the Mortal Human, you hear the wail of a Gibson Flying V scything down the furrows of brown, sweaty, and slick women with eyes the color of ebony, skin borne of the plains of Mahogany.

The Serpent is the twisted and strained neck, fretted in wire, strings so loose and detuned they hang precariously over the inlaid dots that are meaningless in the note-and-a-quarter bends fluidly draining you of the will to work, pay, or buy. You simply want to give your soul over to all the demoniac passions robbed of you by civilization.

Albert King is the silent dictator of a thousand shining cities where the citizens vie for the chance to cry in the streets. In the palace of the cool, he sits entombed in hazy, smoking tendrils. He brings Hell up to us as a shading cloud and Heaven down from the sky as a flaming pillar of fire. All your lonliness he'll try to soothe. He'll play the Blues for you.

Be awed, mortal. He once shared this Earth with you.

Snippet IV

Got drunk by myself last night and they say that's no way to make things right, I just didn't have anything better to do.

That is a bald-faced lie.

Well, yes, but the song is amazing, though the production is terrible. I did have drink, but it was over pizza at the bar.

What song is that?

"Proud Souls" by Cross Canadian Ragweed.

That was real slick.

Hopefully enough people will like the song and buy their albums and they'll make music forever.

Always scheming. You are some sort of mastermind, aren't you?

Yes, but I try to veil it behind heavy doses of complete incompetence. Or heavy handed maneuvers like opening cans of beans with hatchets, keeps 'em guessing.

Funny, I thought the revolution is over.

That's exactly what I want you to think. See how genius works?

Awesome.

Speaking of awesome, I have new links. I might explain that my links are more for my convenience. I like to be able to hit everything of interest from one site.

And comment.

Um. Sure. I do that sometimes. It's only polite.

I am your conscience, I know when you lie.

Too bad you can't tell me when I drink a fat girl skinny at the bar, asshole. So, no, I don't comment much. I know how amazingly refreshing it is to have thirty people saying "OMG, I totally love, love, love ice cream TOO!!!LMAO!!!" It's reassuring on some level and Blogger has no referrer logs, so lurkers are unaccounted for.

What if they link back?

My links are for my own use, they're not recruiting tools. I don't care if they don't link, I don't even want them to in some cases. I don't think I'm the kind of company they want to keep. Creepy desert dreams, rants about killing people, posts that all seem to be about sex even when they're about rocks or guitars or some shit, not really blogosphere material. People's minds are dirty.

Or you're just always horny.

Such a crass word. I prefer toey. No one is sure whether I want to get in a fight or hop in a sack.

So, have you considered trying to write more to an audience instead of self-centered rambling?

No.

Hmmm.

Ok, yes. I even took pictures of squirrels and made up cute captions. It was real blogger activity, I even found a way to complain about Bush in a psuedo-informed manner using the squirrels as a foil, then I figured out ways to link all the people more popular than me in that post. It was amazing. I come this close to buying an iPod.

And then?

I shot the squirrels and made them into fajitas. Would it be gay to put recipes on here?

Probably.

The Anteroom

Feel free to analyze the shit out of this one.

The wooden smell of lemons and the ionized smell of bronze and nickel hangs heavy and deep in the close air. With every breath in and every breath out, swirling galaxies are formed in the silver dust, coming together and exploding away into individual flakes of some greater, floating life. The wooden aroma is from the bodies of the art and the metallic is from the strings. Rosewood, maple, and ashes slowly enriching, and as all beings, decaying in the process of maturing. Necks losing rigidity and bodies impregnating on epoxies, lacquers, and polyurethanes, they hang from hooks or stand on strange, three-legged steel constructs. They are here to be bought and sold, hawked and bartered. The oils of untold hands worn into the necks, grinding string to fret with each emotion choked wail to the muses and to heaven and to hell, stains the fretboards. These are real guitars. A Thinline Tele, an old Strat with the cigarette case tremolo, Gretch Jets, 335's, 325's and the humble Dot. They all languish and reign in the dry air of the eternal, sun-drowned pawn shop. This is the room I find myself in.

The guitars, golden and battered in the slanting sunlight, hold dominion over the quiet, boxy hulks below with a heart of darkened wattage. My fingers trace the golden spiral into the dust icing of a Blackface Twin. Around me, tweed is the rule and black pleather the exception. All of these beasts of burden are loaded with a bygone art, long passed from the glory of cheap production and cajoled into the elitism of the boutique. Lights on top of the control panels of these electric, time-traveling craft are dark where they have glowed pink and purple and amber in thousands of jukes and honkytonks.

I pull away my hand, staring at the dust, ground into the spirals of my finger. I am silent. So are the beasts. So are the wooden pietas hanging from the ceiling.

I am looking for something small, portable. I am leaving soon, and to a place where battery power, resistence to the elements, and compact size are so very useful. The heart of the room is a silver Stratocaster, an angelic host. The gleaming of the metal skin is marred by years of tarnish without the honor of a loving polish. It hurts me to see it. Strung along on a jewel-studded cord run in circles and pinwheels and spirals, sits a small transistor amp the size of a pack of cigarettes.

From behind me, I hear sighs of exhaustion and I know I am not alone. This is no mere pawshop, it is the waiting room to a grand stage. Towering beams shoot up at angles supporting an invisible ceiling. The room is the cheap and cobbled together rule of any backstage, the effort of beauty was better spent in the great auditorium. All backstages suffer this fate.

I turn slowly, choked in the stifling room, to see four men dressed in maroon suede and felt. Their close cropped hair or greasy curls are uniformly neat and rest on top of their mahogany skin. Eons of decades have come and gone between their time and mine. They represent a world of shoes polished instead of blinging Jordans and stuffy suits instead of garish sweatsuits. They are the hiphop of their age, exploiters of the exploitation. The fatigue on their faces enumerates the grand stages they have played to white audiences who would lynch them for talking wrong to their cousins. They are the most exploited of all the huddled masses; the acceptable negro. In their method of vocation, they exploit the status quo in return. They are tarnished with sweat and sell-out.

They dutifully ignore me, the blue eyed stranger, as black men always do. In all of the fires of the ghettos yet to grace their children's decade, never will the thousand yard, ignoring stare leave their community. In my time, in the places I have been, I have experienced it often enough. They are afraid of me and what I may do or say. They are also speechlessly exhausted.

I turn back to the small amp, silver and black, with knobs grinding out of it and KORG scripted in block font across the speaker. It is a gadget and most guitarists love gadgets. The knob on the side has the many models of sound to choose from; clean, dirty, M. stack, F. twin, V. clean. I turn it slowly to the first notch. When the needle hits "clean," the unit glows orange in my hand and music falls out of it in a demo of the model. The music scratches at my ears with its unoffending terribleness. It is slow and plodding prewar big band music. The lush orchestra builds the all major chords into a power house of mediocrity. White folks music. I am embarrassed by it, but can't turn it off. Through the syrup of the music, nearly devoid of drums or bassline, a voice vomits through. With the long, over-pronounced vocals of an old Disney cartoon, the man sings, "I am going to Kansahs City, Kansahs City here I come..."

The singer continues while I start to chuckle a little and desperately try to kill the terrible noise. As I peek over my shoulder, I see the nearest musician staring at the box in a combination of disgust, perplexity, and amusement at the abuse of the cliche blues standard. The switches won't move and the lardy voice continues, "They got some crazy little loving there and I am going to get me some."

I rip the chord from the amp, the orange glow fades but the flatulent music remains. I turn around, the spell is broken, all eyes are on me. We are all amused.

I shrug, "At least somebody finally did something different with Kansas City."

The disgusted and amused musician laughed, "I was just thinking the same damn thing."

Then the dream was over.

Cohabitation

A very wise man once said that two men can never truly peacefully cohabitate, that all they can accomplish is a bitter cold war of buried hostility. This is true. Has always been true.

Therefore, let me tell a story:

I do not think my roommate is unintelligent, mean, annoying, or in any way unlikable. He is a pretty good guy, all told. All that being said, I sometimes hate him. This is for no other reason than men are territorial by nature. I like my house best when he is out of town, and the opposite is true, I'm sure. We have lived together longer than I have ever lived with anyone for one unbroken stretch, including persons I may have been having sex with and/or married. I hate him, sometimes. Never when he is there, I have no problem when he is there to speak to.

No, I hate him when he is not there and his living evidence annoys me. For instance, I walked into the bathroom and found four articles of reading material, they were:

1. Don Quixote, Cervantes
2. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway
3. Travels With Charley in Search of America, Steinbeck
4. Swank Adults Only!!!, Various women in states of feigned ecstasy

3/4 of the reading material in the bathroom was mine. 75% of it would not offend a girl I may or may not have brought to my house. One fourth of the reading material has on the cover, "Put your penis in sticky Venus!", and my favorite, "Innocent angels spreads like Hell!"

Remind me not to teach graamar from the annals of porn.

But there, sitting ugly and garishly appointed in pinks and greens straight out of the Crasstacular Journal of all Things Dirty, was some girl wearing some type of fishing net with a finger pulling her lower lip down and with eyes sloppily drooped in a manner that is either trying to be sexy or simulating a seacow with missing chromosomes. That dirty filth rests on top of Travels With Charley and now I am worried about opening up that amazing travelogue because I'm afraid that a hand that has touched a penis and then touched the magazine that sits on top of my book that I would grip in my hands may not have been washed. I thought Oprah's book club was bad for Steinbeck, but her ugly giant "O" sticker on the cover of East of Eden could never dissuade me from fine literature quite so much as that well-thumbed copy of Swank.

Oh, crap

You know, this may have been something that popped up in your consciousness before, but it rarely makes landfall on my own shoreline of rational expectations. I might die.

My life has been one string of near misses after another. What if my luck is out? What if it's out in June?

Is there any God waiting to meet me? I see now why poor people have always believed in religions. When your situation is tenuous, the stakes are pretty high. I have my own religion that is loosely based on one or two principles of a possible afterlife, but it isn't enough to calm my worried mind. At the very least I might luck out and something of me will make it into the rocks some day out there, further on up the road.

When I'm back there, again, what if I die? Will all my convictions die with me, bleeding out of me with my blood while I just grow cold and forgetful until enough blood leaves my brain that all goes black? Who will feel like I do, or want justice the way I do?

I have no children. Nothing of me will be left but pointless Internet ramblings slowly waiting on my credit card to quit paying server fees. Besides some memories, lionized in the minds of those who will not be subject to my objectivity, I leave this world nothing. I will just go away.

This is all assuming that the unlikely happens, of course. I'm just worried that no one else will ever see the World that I see ever again. It deserves it, I think.

Oh well.

Fuck

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

So, the VA (Dept. of Veteran's Affairs) is full of chimps beating willy-nilly upon computing machines and if not properly stroked in their tenaciously entrenched beds of bureaucratic, simian filth will regularly go on pointy-headed power trips or merely lose whatever common sense and proficiency they may have. My lab tests that are part and parcel of my overseas deployment screening are somewhere between here and the Orion Nebula, but lost to myself and the greater dedicated medical branch of an underfunded and inefficient organization.

So, did this get me out of going to Iraq? No. I'm not upset about that, I've got myself pretty revved up to go. What pisses me off is that instead of Feb. 11th, I have been pushed back to June. In other words the frustration, the moving my stuff out of my house, the saying last goodbyes and setting up accounts, the sleeping with women I should not have; all of that was in vain and premature.

So, I says Fuck.

I know there's a lot of positives to all this, but if you bother pointing them out while I'm in this mood I may say terrible things about you mother.

I try never to use any type of italics or capitalization in writing, I like to think I need no training wheels. I will say this:

Iraq, Southwest Asia in general, in June FUCKING SUCKS.

Bitches.

Ducking Out

I'm not going to be around much the next month. I have a lot to write about, but not the motivation. I spent a week or so in Denton participating in activities I should not have. Normally, The Meters rock. With the type of fun I had, The Meters become a minor force of nature. Like the gravitons of funk. Gravitons of Funk is a kick-ass name for something.

I got a solid date, at least. On February 11th, my fuzzy butt will be in Norfolk, Virginia for processing into SELRES and training. I will be there until some time in March. After that, my destination is predictable.

So, February, you might start seeing more of me. Until then, I've got a lot of stuff to do. Don't forget about me in the mean time.

Everything Was Beautiful and No Highwaymen Hurt

It was night, wind a gusty torrent, ghostly galleon sailing and so forth.

Cold as fuck. Frost and ice clung on to every single surface, forks frozen, pipe frozen, booger froze in my nosen.

Some asshole had dumped over eight bunks of PVC sched 80 conduit into the back lot, a random act of stupidity, not an evidence of an over-all stupidity on the part of the dumper. Pipe of all sizes, ten foot sticks, dumped over and left over night for two nights, tied themselves in a dark gray love-knot. I had been equipped with only the shittiest of supplies, gloves a-shitty. And so on. Beautiful.

I built a new bunk of pipe, drug it from asunder, melded it in wonder. Motherfucker is six feet tall and eight feet deep. I hope I'm not, and somehow know I will end up, being the guy in a week or two who has to drag that PVC megalith inside and try to work it into the pipe corral.

At one point, the forklift, having found the drainage from a faucet left on for weeks, went spinning in the moonlight, careening in the moonlight, skidding in the moonlight and totally fucking knocked over a stack of iron 2 inch pipe.

I pulled in to the rollcage, barely saving my hand. The black pipe loosened in its casement and my face would have possibly burnt like a brand had not it been frozen. The black waves fell all around the forklift's breast in the moonlight. (Goddamn it, I wish I could see better in the moonlight). Fuck working in the moonlight. I'm pretty sure I shouted obscenities at the moonlight.

I stacked all that bullshit back up over the course of three hours, my hands freezing on the pipes. I lited the stack to a shabby former form and went to work on the PVC again. After a couple hours of wading through the , plaited, gray bramblefuck, I had another bunk built. I scooped it up onto the forklift after I used my truck to jump the battery that the cold had claimed. After rolling into the cage and lifting the bunk about two feet of the required ten, the forklift, victim of circumstance was dead from the blast of a broken propane regulator.

And so on. Beautiful.

Anyway, twelve hours and minor frostbite later, I would be home. But I will know that next time the wind blows a gusty torrent and the moon sails a ghostly galleon, and so forth, the rest of the broken bunks will wait with love knot tied in gray, woven plaits of bullshit.

11.9 hours (don't go into overtime!) of that shit last night. Fuck.

More Anthropomorphic Geology

Twice today, two diametrically disparate individuals have asked me the same question.

"Do you miss her?"

Interesting.

To understand the question, and the askers cannot, you have to understand the tumult of me and her. We were explosive and beautiful together. We were partners, team mates, lovers of passion and soul. I don't miss her.

I am not callous or heartless. If anything, though few would ever guess, I am excessively sensitive to a select few. Friends and lovers can attest to a softie of unmatched proportion lurking inside the shit talker, pool shark, beer guzzler, and guitar strangler.

Have you ever loved and missed? I move drunkenly that, with notable exception, you have not. As the puppy eyes and coy smiles are not love and neither the comfortable proximity, neither is the slight ache from a business weekend or a week of tittering argument "missing". I ask have you loved and missed the way I ask have lived and breathed the scent of the being and their absence?

I stood away from the world, chevalier defending a weak hearted damsel never out of distress. We loved as I drink this Stella here, thousands of miles from where we started and where we ended, habitually and with every fermion and quark of my being aching for more than can be taken in. The gushing emotion of a thousand parishioners exulting in their perceived divine truth could never match the trickle of her hand on my cheek. The slowest, weightiest glacier could never match the sheer force of our fights. She found a wellspring of passion I never knew I had. She found the fire that I repressed after it landed me in the cooler or in a heap of beaten flesh a few too many times. She loved me. She did, and though I still judge the validity of that particular catch-all word on the merits of her lacking, when I'm honest, I can admit that she loved me more than any other ever has.

Her eyes. Have you ever stood in a canyon and watched the rain fall on a sunny day? The azure sky, filled with falling diamonds, the golden grass, used to hold me transfixed in her eyes. She had beautiful eyes.

I don't miss her, nor do I love her. Let me explain.

When a man loses a limb, for reasons of nervous continuity, he still hurts in that limb. They are referred to as ghost pains, pains of limbs long incinerated in a heap of other removed human paraphernalia. Have you ever skinned a knee and felt the wind bite into it if it was exposed to the air? Imagine feeling the swirling wind, full of salt and wonder, smarting an open wound along your side and under your loving arm where a person had been amputated. She used to stand next to me, always cold, huddled against my thick side. When the conditions of war and so on tore us two apart, the ghost pains shot through that part of me, in my meaty side, where we had grown together and been torn asunder. I missed her as I would miss an aching and amputated leg, wishing she was there, or had never been there in the first place, but always stinging along the torn side.

So, though I have feelings that many who have never endured that life-losing love and love-losing life of her and I would mistake for loving and missing, I don't miss her or love her.

I feel emotions that those who live their life in shallow bobbing flotation on the surface of the puddle of feeling would mistake for love. I sometimes grow wistful for her arms in a manner that those who have never been mired in mercury waters and sand drifts far from home would mistake for missing her.

It's all just sad. I wish she had never been torn away or she had never been there in the first place. She is a ragged stump, rolled in salt and cauterized with hot iron. On the other hand, I think I got away more clean from our union than she did. I'm lucky, I guess. It could have been worse. I could have been her. I don't even know how she makes it through a single day.

I guess I should wrap this up. Sorry for the downer, just thoughts you have under a prairie sky thinking a thousand lives dead and gone back from the grave. Where will she turn back into dust and sand? I don't know. I have a feeling she already has. God save her.

IM Quotable quote

L. Gilmore, who has no intentions on my privates or on those of any physicist, has been a good friend for years.

Casey: "Don't you think caution is needed when using ordinary language to ascribe attributes to God?"
Casey: -Niels Bohr
MsL: "Fuck Niels Bohr"
MsL: -L. Gilmore
MsL: Make THAT a quote for your stupid website.
Casey: That's lame
MsL: It is not lame
Casey: Wait, you want to fuck Niels Bohr?
MsL: I would fuck Niels Bohr if he was hung like you
Casey: Now THAT'S a quote.

Pilgrimage and So Forth

The last installment of the Pilgrimage series is done. I decided to offer parts I, II, III, and IV in one file. It's broken up into four parts, clearly marked. Anyway, there, that's done.

That was a pain in the ass.

Here is the link: Pilgrimage

I figured I'd answer a few questions I anticipate now that that's all over.

Q. You were 12?

A. Yes, I was, I also wrote it down, or rather typed it in WP 5.1 on a Tandy 1000. I've always kept journals of memorable dreams. Obviously, I didn't write it so well at 12 as I can now.

Q. So, are there more?

A. Maybe, these things are long and I think they lose readership, but that may just be my kneejerk reaction to any of my posts over three paragraphs. Also, I have many of them written in journals, but they're very dark and sometimes a little too intimate for me to share with all of you.

Q. Are you crazy?

A. No, but sometimes my writing takes that direction, usually in relation to music I'm listening to. The entirety of the writing of the Pilgrimage series was done listening to Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s, Yanqui U.X.O.

Q. Do you think you are/Are you Jesus?

A. No.

Q. Then why the dreams?

A. My life has a spiritual back story that you can't possibly imagine. I try not to write about it because there is no way for me to do that without your prejudices attacking a great and truly original people because their beliefs are not your own. Though my status within that group is sketchy, I love them too much to ever do that.

Q. So about that other thing...

A. February 17 or so, I'll be on my way to southern Iraq via Norfolk, Virginia, reactivated into the active duty US Navy. The best job description I can give for my new duty is either "Pirate" or "Coast Guard sans ROE". No, I'm not scared. Yes, I'll miss home. No, nothing can make me stay. Yes, I'll stay in touch as much as I can.

Pilgrimage III

The first impression I had was of blood.

Crimson stalks of satin drapes, shimmering with oily iridescence, fell from the incredibly high ceiling and extended out into the floor, billowing in the breeze of our entry. The light shining through the gauzy body of the drapes gave the impression of a pool filled with swirling, red liquid on the marble floor. The walls were of heavy granite and slate; men in black, ornate uniforms stood guard lined shoulder to shoulder along the wall opposite our entry. The motionless rank extended down the hall into eternity. They held a gaze above our heads and did not move. They were dead.

We walked forward slowly, every step a ringing gunshot in the large hall. The cacophony of the circling helicopters outside pummeled the air and quenched as the doors slid shut. The agency of authority had not detected our entry into the building, though they knew we were coming. The courthouse of the damned had no windows save small squares immediately below the towering ceiling. We began to walk toward the brass-framed directory hanging on the far wall.

The directory was in some odd, glyphic language. There was no map. Down the hall to our right, the normal bustle of border crossing was audible. We had not come through the correct door. We were not supposed to be here, and anyone who saw us would know it.

The air was shattered by clacking footsteps of high heels on marble tile. We had no escape. It would be a fight. And I was the only one of our group capable of the fight. I stuffed the boy behind the solid line of corpse guards and directed the girl behind him. I feigned confidence and told them to remain silent, no matter what. The steps were reporting closer and closer. I crouched in front of the directory and waited to strike. I had no rocks this time. White heels and a sensible, though glaring, white suit walked in front of me and stopped. She turned towards me. I remained in a crouch, though I did not pounce as I had planned. She walked up to me and squatted down. She was a beautifully appointed woman of commerce and business. Her flowing, golden hair fell around her face and her eyes were pale blue.

She smiled.

"Are you lost?"

"Yes."

"Let me help you."

Her pale hand, manicured and thin, reached out for mine. Her smile ripened and showed her perfect, white teeth. I took her hand and she pulled me up out of the crouch as she stood. Her voice was without regional locution and her face betrayed no heritage. She was refinement and salesmanship made manifest. She was a business woman, like they had in movies, and she wanted to help me, a poor and country boy from the beans and the rich, brown Earth. Her hand was smooth, without callous or blemish and her suit showed no stains from working deep in the soil or caring for the sick, the dying, and the children. Her hair was not knotted or streaked with the gray of a hard life in a hard climate living the hard faith of the Brethren. She was like no woman I had ever seen with my own eyes, though she was alive and well in the iris of a dozen projectors in the Cortez Magnificente Theatre.

I couldn't take my eyes off of her. "I have friends."

"I know."

I called the two, and they came out from behind the displayed death. The girl's face was troubled and she looked suspiciously at the woman. The boy, without question, comment, or even recognition grabbed my hand. The girl followed with arms folded.

"We need to get to the North."

"Yes."

We walked toward the bustle of the crossing, her heels reverberating odd the slate walls and dead guards, the drapes billowing after her swaying walk.

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.