April 10, 2004

Erupting from the pavement like a pebble hurtled from a makeshift slingshot, the tires screeched and smoked with an enviable fury. Streaks of burnt rubber fused with cement, rubbing at the cushion that supported us from collapsing into the unforgiving rock. My belly sank deep into my groin, pushing at the remnants of yesterdays dinner. I opened my bottle and glugged at the fresh red merlot, everything was OK , I just hoped I didn’t run out of wine, and at the rate I was gulping it down, that was quite likely.

I am a sucker for a good red wine. It is as if every cell in my body screamed out for refreshment, a tantalizing affliction of enjoyment. The beatnik relaxation of natural enebriation by the finest of the fruits, the careful crushing, pressing my nose to the glass, stirring the juice from pulp.

Cars turned into hotwheels toys cruising on roads of glass, houses turned into monopoly pieces, a couple hotels for broadway ave, throw the dice again boy, you seem lucky today. A Patchwork quilt made of property lines stiched together with the seams of concrete, unforgiving layers built on a solid single line going here to there and over again, restiched, layered, separated and fused into a single terrain. It grows so quietly, spreading across the horizon into the distance, never ending patterns of growth maximizing on our jovial desires to expand. Culdesacs shrink to the size of a scribble in the sand shorelines wave their depths, as inconsistent as a drunkards speech, 1.5 million dollar mansions become trailer homes, disappearing into the haze as if there is no difference. The glory of our possessions is only skin deep, but we never let go. Looking for resemblance in our surroundings, look deeper and find nothing, just a repetition of things that are familiar, no answer, no smoking gun to resolve the question.

Exhaust spewing from my ears, I steamed at nothing, irrelevant they say. What is the matter with a bit of truth to hide the never ceasing distractions we create. Earning nothing more than a yearning for something else, no satisfaction of your creation just take whats given, shut up and accept it. Nothing is perfect. We are a sensible society and there is no one that can take that liberty from me.

I open up my jar of wine for another sip. Smells overwhelm me, I cannot get away from the turbulence, a shaking of my reality somedays is all I want. Give it to me and I will be happy. Don’t even try to explain it because I aint listening. Theres nothing to it, just take this job and shove it sir, im so over the congratulations you did a great job, masturbating to the corporate love of achievement. An appeasement of the masses in denial, ive me a decent trial and I will beat it. Beat it hard, twice, I will beat it raw until it stings. The masterful things that you can say to me would never change the sight I see today.

Bring it on. The dove sails slowly into oblivion, searching for freedom in the skies. Roaring through the demise of its cause, the cost is unbearable. Its wings are so fragile they pull apart before the blades can tear them. The rotors cough in satisfaction and I watch the blood turn to aerosol, spraying lightly over my window. Great. I wanted to see Washington DC covered in blood anyways. The blood of the free, the innocent laid before us. A mass grave of deficit that betrayed us and spit out our inheritance into the rivers. Poisoning the livers with oil, fatty acids rip at my gut. I take another gulp, and close my eyes. Two hours sleep is all it takes to keep me moving, even very slightly I am feeling the desperation of a tormented nation, a world in chaos waiting for change. Nobody can lead them into a new day. There is nothing left to say to the willing masses, the working classes had it all right a hundred years ago. There is nowhere we can go to turn, brothers hung and burned for supporting the notion of something else. A horizon faded into the distance long before we realized it existed, there is no end in sight.

Farmland patched together with subsidies. A memory of a day that everything was possible. Why could we not just do it then and save the generations the hassle. The blood shed from fourty important legislators can equal the wars of a hundred years. Millions we could spare, what ever happened to the sooth sayer, we asked the wrong questions and found an answer.

Misleading in the nature, we grow together in sanctity, the almighty answer awaits us, and we are free.

Freely mislead, sheltering a notion that there is nothing deeper. An empty commotion that we have found the way to live, separated in every way imaginable but together in our lack of completion. Our slack integration of ideals is obvious, we remain guilty and anonymous, tied to the cross of some ancient religion, to follow in submission as they tell us. Reinterpret my thoughts and rewrite it as divine knowledge, I spent 40 grand on a college degree and this is all you can do. A hollow truth to satisfy your peers, all the years spent studying the history and its still not apparent that we are a complete blasphemy, a stinking well of death and misery.

The stench was intolerable, like some animal died under the chair below us a few weeks ago and was sitting bloated, slowly releasing the methane gasses from a belly swollen like a balloon. Man, did this guy ever shower? You would think it should be easy enough to do before traveling across the country in cramped quarters. I gave him my deodorant.. “Just keep it, I don’t use it anyways, I got another one I like, that one is brand new.. it’s your Lucky Day, I just would feel bad throwing it away”. I clumsily covered up my intentions, maybe the guy didn’t notice that I was ready to jump over him to the bathroom, to another row where that cute girl probably had a much better smelling body, at least I could imagine. Pinned in, tight as nails in a row ready to slam into plywood, Glued with a single line of plastic, our only separation from the germs and God knows what else could live in there.

I slightly remember the conditions that placed me in this plane on my way to some foreign destination. The cause and effect of determination that cannot be broken, sold maybe. But I cannot recall for how much, if any. Maybe I am just a sucker after all the lies and fighting over who was the winner of which game, in ignorant jubilation of the selfsame nothing that brought us together. Drinking ourselves into oblivion and then going out to have some fun, I cannot remember beyond the haze.

Clouds spread across the ground below me, a continuous random network, existing entirely of nothing tangible, there is no substance to support my claims, only an unknown belief that I carry, as scattered as the clouds over desert plains. Dripping dust into the valleys that expect rain, a monsoon of deception washes away our sins and leaves us dripping in blood. The rivers snake their way through the patchwork, feeding grass and trees with gentility, rushing forward to carry sediment, building and changing and moving and flowing always toward something new. A horizon opens before me, the rocky mountain reality. Snow and glaciers slide an inch a year to slide off mountain tops, crushing 1000 year forests into splinters, shift the gears and go faster, make your way over the pass, screaming bloody hell as we rip and roll into the future tomorrow holds another secret, another motion towards what we can dream as our own accidental realization. The state of the nation is a disputable notion, a segregated potion ready to explode in anger, fury driving aggression from the east, west. Nothing can repress the emotion that drives pistons to combustion, a brunt release, the deadly combination of gas and pressure. Contained in a core so small there is no escape from the exhaustion, rotating in a blinding cycle of determined destruction. Eating away at the forests and mountains with stripmined precision and clearcut aggression against all things beautiful. Water turns to vapor and crystalises on my window, fogging up in the frosty netherworld a mile from the surface of God’s great Earth. We have no business being here , there is no ultimatum we press towards, a final goal being nothing more than what we left behind, just in a different setting. Surrounding ourselves with a contrived sense of reality we manage to continue the deceit for our children to inherit, a great fortune of lies and gore, a legacy of intentional injustice and inequality.

What the fuck has happened to us, after generations of complacency we became as evil as the devil himself. Our simple ignorance allowed the nightmares we feared to become our dreams, pushing forward always into unconquered lands, peoples unaware of munitions become casualties. Civilans are too dumb to notice, they are just a statistic, a static byproduct of the quest for intelligence so we can root it out and exterminate it. There are no questions, and no answers, if we don’t know the difference. Tribal elders consist of the building blocks, the answer knocks at our door and we shoot it. Unknowing, uncaring, unsympathetic to the reason, kill or be killed indiscriminately. Retreat to the mountains to be found and slaughtered. Hitchhiking in the early morning, broken down cars line the streets. Looking for help from the first person you meet and they rape you and drop you. Laying in the misery looking for help and they rape you again until you are worthless, a piece of meat for the feeding. Medium rare with no bones or gristle, and no awareness we are treated like livestock, sold and bought and traded like stock on the open market. Our trades become side effects to the purpose: money.

Money money money. Oh how sweet is the bitter pill of greed, decaying slowly inside every capitalistic seed, semen penetrating the womb, violating and destructive… breeding lies and deceit, hatred and more greed, and more more money money money. We are all whores, brought into prostitution by our parents, taught at an early age to open up to the MAN, ask no questions. Love him with no feeling, the MAN never stops coming back to steal everything, the emotion is raw. Bleeding and empty, sore and destroyed, we are whores and accept the money with a painful smile, and an empty kiss, a swallow of poison. The replacement for bliss is capitalism and we know it but there is no change. Tied to the line waiting for a moment of silence, the requirements are never ending; your work never good enough. Limp and abused we lay in waiting, wishing there was another way to make a living, looking for redemption in unforgiving patrons.