I Dare Not Tell You

I dare not tell you the way that I travel, for if I do blood might start to run out of your ears as your eyes go black and the ceiling begins to melt and drip like hot wax splashing down on the linoleum. I dare not tell because it would surely be either the end of you or me. If you didn’t disintegrate entirely, you would be fiercely incensed against me and after rounding up your neighbors you’d all come rambling up the street, up that gently sloping stretch of road that we call hillside blvd., to the nests of mist shrouded graveyards and at last to my high tower, where I have barricaded myself within the living room with nothing but granola bars and bottled water and the three holy books and an endless supply of paper and pens to compensate for the loss of my computer, (for you and your horde will surely cut the power when you lay siege to my tower.)
You and your neighbors, good God fearing people will brandish torches and pitch forks and howl and shout. Perhaps the local preacher, an old Filipino man who’s brother of the same profession sells sulfur water in southern California, will try to calm you all with a sermon about peace and tolerance from where he stands on the hood of a red Honda. With a cry, you, now one with the mass, will impale him and roast him over the torches like a weenie on the tip of a fork at a summer camp fire. That will be the end of the resistance and you will eventually light fire to my tower, hoping to smoke me out. Unfortunately for your blood lust, I will not come running out of the front door, nor even come scrambling down the fire escape at the back. It will be assumed that I burned to death inside of the building. Sifting through the ashen remains of my abode will reveal no sign of me, and the horde will retire to their trailers, box houses, or houses out of a box to rest on the sofa and watch a little bit of reality TV while super cooks in the microwave. There’s nothing like a Diet Pepsi over a compartmentalized tray of turkey, mashed potatoes, peas, and cranberry sauce with gravy all over to wash the bitter aftertaste of mob mentality from the palette. Back in solitary cubicles the mass can dissolve into a multitude of tiny fragments, each one certain that it is quiet important and possibly even better than the rest, but most definitely better than all of the goddamn plants and animals that sustain their majestic human existence. Alone under the glow of the great cathode tube glow, the crown of creation sits in black socks and boxer shorts, hairy belly hanging out from under a white T-shirt, flakes of dandruff cascading down from the thinning forest of head hair like a spring blizzard. Driving along in a blue mini van listening to self help tapes and shouting at a pair of overly rambunctious tots in the back seat, his better half, wearing a powder blue valour sweat suit is checking her makeup in the rearview mirror and thinking of things to say to the other moms at the playground that will make them feel as bad about their lives as she feels about hers. All in all, humanity will go on crawling about the face of the earth like a big blind worm groping hungrily at its surroundings.
I dare not tell you how I survived the fire, because you will only hate me for it. Things that spend all of their time groping around in the dark and looking for holes to hide in will never love the heat and light of the blaze. They will even imagine it as a hell and home for demons, creatures unlike themselves. Creatures that do more than consume and wallow fearfully lack the appetites of their step siblings, God’s favorites. Perhaps as you have read this, you have sympathized more with that which I have called "me" than with that which I have called "you." In that case then you are now three teenagers, one with long greasy hair and a heavy metal band shirt on, another with short hair, spectacles and a vintage Dungeons and Dragons baseball shirt, the third, a short skinny Latino in a thread worn red hand me down T-shirt and frayed jeans. You three come to the charred ruins of my apartment building in the white haze of a Daly City afternoon (for the sun rarely breaks through the vaporous apparitions that drift through the air). Everyone else is at work or in school, so the street is very quiet and feels abandoned, as if no one had been there for a very long time. Looking around to be sure that no one is watching, you gather ash in zip lock baggies and then leave as inconspicuously as possible, walking two to the sidewalk and one kicking along in the gutter, (that would be the skinny Latino). I dare not say what it is that you will be doing with that. I dare not say how you learned to travel, for if I do, you might become obsessed with the outward form of it and try to emulate that which you have already done in accordance with this story. I will only remind you, that no one told you what to do exactly. The way was paved for you and by you through trial and error inspired by the etchings left in the cave walls by those that passed this way before you.

The Riddle

"Mr.White expected a seriousness of purpose in us which provided discipline and willpower in those early years; and we learned the electrical and ideological trades from the ground plug up; for there’s no substitute for brain conduction."
-William T. Vollmann, You Bright & Risen Angels

I open my mouth and the story pours out in white hot streams like geothermal spring water boiled down in the kettle of my belly an inch or so above my navel. What comes from here will be out of the hands of my brain, that is to say that my waking consciousness is being restrained so that the wily so called "sub" consciousness can come out and speak its piece, play its games, and in general, enjoy its witching hour. You never do know just what things do come out to play while your head lays sinking into your triple stuffed pillow and the clock ticks slowly from 11:30 to 12:30. I personally have seen the demons playing under the moonlight at my window sill. This fortunate glimpse was afforded me due to my unusual habit of staying awake in the dark so that I may pour the Serotonin which is being produced inside my head during the sun’s absence into little cups of digital delight. I use this substance as the central ingredient in recipes for disaster which invoke worlds of every kind shape and color.
Just last night, for example, I awoke disturbed by a rustling which sounded like some one going through my most prized and secret documents, the seeds from which the aforementioned worlds sprout. This was long after the witching hour had past, which goes to show that the devil has reign over more hours of the night than the lore tells us. I awakened myself by shouting,
"Who’s here?"
Sitting up I grappled for the flashlight kept near the head of my bed and hastily clicked it on, directing it towards a small shadow scurrying away from my head.
‘Ew, a mouse.’ I thought just before the palm sized creature was caught in the ellipse of yellow light beaming from my big black battery powered tool. At this point I had risen from my bed to scuttle after the evading intruder and get a good view. There, under the spotlight, I caught sight of the thing which plainly was not a mouse, but rather something like a tiny triceratops.
‘I am dreaming’. I thought. I even said it aloud, but I had goose pimples all up and down my arms and was in fact too cold to be snuggled warm in my bed merely imagining such a phantom. Clearly I was awake. More awake than usual in fact. I hurried to the kitchen and found a large jar and rushing back scooped the critter up so that I would have evidence against the supposition that I was hallucinating. It was then that I looked much closer at it and realized that it was not a dinosaur as I had originally assessed it to be, but rather a very small rhinoceros.
As this dawned on me, my spirit leaped from me, extending into a parallel world where I asked someone that seemed vaguely familiar what a Rhinoceros could stand for, what it could mean. That someone was a female with short dark hair and pale skin. I became her and began to suggest to myself that it was something male and strong.
Meanwhile, back in my bedroom, I startled awake for the second time that night, still hearing the suspicious rustling. Gone was the mouse turned triceratops turned rhino. This time I didn’t use the flashlight and switched on the lamp. Oh good heavens! It was just the cat. (Cat? I don’t have a cat.)
"My god," I thought to myself, "it’s the cat I brought in to feed a week ago before leaving to vacation in sunny southern California. (Is that true?) I left the poor thing alone in my apartment for more than a week. It must be starving." I think, (if this is true that I actually brought it cat food before I left.) "Come on Riddle, here kitty kitty." (I let the Riddle in and fed it?)
Together we went to the kitchen, and I opened the refrigerator slowly. If there was cat food in there then this was real. There was. An open bag of kitty kibble was spilling out on the white plastic of the bottom shelf. I noticed that Riddle had one distinguishing feature: a white star on his/her forehead.
I then woke up for the third time.
So you see these things do exist, they do come out to play, and you should be concerned. You should recognize that you too were visited last night by something OTHER. You convinced yourself that it was only a dream, or perhaps you shut it out entirely and imagined that you slept without dreaming. Both possibilities are a lie. Something real visited you last night, or perhaps more accurately, you visited it when one part of you, the watch dog, wasn’t looking. Even more accurately I would say that the wall came down, just as the antichrist has suggested that it should, and what you found outside the city’s keep was another form of yourself: The Riddle.

I AM NOT

What I found in the cracks between those yellow tiles installed in the late 1950’s is a mystery. The sight of it made me weep diamonds. They trickled down my cheeks like tiny crystal ants, their antennae twitching observantly as they made their way over the dunes of my cheek bones and crawled around behind my earlobes to march in a line down the nape of my neck, moistening the forgotten curls of hair hidden there.
I will never tell you what I saw. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. They say that it’s possible that the ancient Greeks couldn’t perceive color in the way that we do. This theory is based on certain curious passages in the Iliad which suggest that the sight of the author was somewhat different from the sight of the modern man, used to sitting upon his sofa watching Spike TV on a high definition plasma screen television, his Bermuda shorts catching the survivors after he crams greasy handfuls of brittle potato shavings into his open mouth, pupils dilated attentively as crimson arcs of blood splash across the screen before him.
When Homer looked out at the arid cliffs of the Mediterranean, he saw something more akin to black and white, only we haven’t got the words to accurately describe what he actually saw, and at this point we have even less imagination than words, so you see, ours is a desperate situation. We will never actually uncover the secrets captured in the blink of a Greek eye.
For that same reason I cannot tell you about the landscapes that I have visited in the lines of grout near the kitchen sink, nor about the craters around the abysmal mouth of the drain. I look at the mouths of the humans nearest to me and watch them move in complicated contortions of tongue, lip and teeth, and in the end all that I can hear is my own whispered interpretations, like a gentle Zephyr blowing through my mind, bringing back to me notions tied to my earliest perceptions. Sensations tangled in my fathers beard and the sunlight glinting off the window frames to shimmer on the gossamer web of a green spider.
These things outside trigger a little pop fizz inside, a torrent of psychic and physical sensations. The muscles in my own face jerk and contort correspondingly as part of this miniature animal dance. The flicker of an eye lid, the slow rise of brows, mouth curled up at the corners, a flash of teeth.
No, I have no idea what any of it really means. It transpires automatically. I like it better when I put the scene on mute so that nonsense is the only sense left to me. I cut the line between the outside and the inside. What I see on the screen of the mind will not make me jump and dance. I will dance when I say "Dance!" All of this human twitching and confusion is draining, a waste of the liquid fire running in figure eight from prow to stern of the biological space ship I inhabit.
With this vessel, which as far as I can actually tell, despite the appearance of others that would seem to be of like kind, is the only one in existence, or at least the only one I can influence directly, I voyage into an arena of color and sound that combines to create a chaotic roar, (we call this noise) and when the anarchy reaches critical mass it becomes silence. It is like turning the television on to watch the snow and hear the static as you meditate in a straight back chair, a mechanism for blotting out the more distinct noises of your neighbors talking through the paper thin walls and car horns bleating outside the window. All of those very distinct sounds which call me into human existence, I drown them out with the hiss and roar.
I do this to lessen the great shock that I will no doubt experience when I die and discover that I was never human at all. Why insist that I am human now? Oh it’s true, I am in a human spaceship now, but that does not mean that I am a human space ship.
I am not.
I am.
I am NOT.
When they see me in those places that I cannot describe to you, they, the indescribable others, say, "Welcome back Not! We’re so glad to have you!" Then all of us Nots crash together and howl, bouncing one off of another, creating a din that can only be appreciated by the initiated Maenad, who standing barefoot on the forest floor goes stock still, eyes widening as she feels us crashing in through the open portal in her chest, mud smeared upon her bare arms, twigs lodged in her hair, crystal ants crashing down to shatter upon her naked breast.

Terrible Procedure

The terrible deed of separating the pure Being, (the primary ingredient necessary for eventually forming a soul,) from the biological human machine, (also a necessary ingredient in the recipe) is being committed daily as part of a wide scale campaign. Our souls, and the souls of our children, are being harvested before they have even developed. They are being shorn apart and the Being is left to wither away, a tiny prisoner atrophying in a dark and isolated cell submerged somewhere within the mechanics of the biological organism.
Our attention, from an early age, is misdirected for us. We are a consumer culture, asked to passively accept Hannah Montana and designer sports shoes and fast food franchises. The surgical separation of Being from machine is being executed in our living rooms as we sit before the eerie glow of the television set pushing the peas of our microwave dinners around in their individual compartments, it is happening in our school rooms under ceilings laden with asbestos or in modular units that pound like a war drum as the pupils enter the room in straight lines and proceed to their desks to fold their hands and turn their attention back to the dry erase board and the drone of a fully damaged adult machine who is ultimately eager, like every chained dog, to beat the free spirits under their dominion into submission so that they will not be alone in their dysfunction. It is happening in the den in front of a liquid crystal computer monitor where the television is enforced. It is happening on the highways lined with the mammoth billboards suggesting products that we may use to fill the void left when the Being was starved down into an invalid, it is happening on the play structure where those who are most susceptible to the multilevel procedure in turn indoctrinate their peers, bullying and tormenting.
Soon we are all the same, or at least we are all striving to be the same, and those of us who can’t achiever sameness, by age 9 (sometimes earlier)we are driven to a therapist once or twice a week and drugs are prescribed which will at last break our will to live. Then it will be easier to shuffle us around with the ringing of a bell, and by the time we are adults the routine will be engrained in the muscle memory of our bio machine so that we will be able to shuffle off to work and clock in, take a break at noon and clock out, clock back in 30 minutes later, and shuffle back out at 5 or 6 p.m., so that we can wait in nice neat lines inside of the shiny metal cars we bought with our hard earned money, and wait for the light to change colors deciding for us when we should stop and when we should go.
The very idea of being active, the notion of being a creator and not a consumer is frowned upon. Artist and musicians are bums, actors and actresses are flaky unreliable people incapable of holding regular jobs. There will be a few of them to sing the songs and play the plays that enforce and justify our consumer existence. The act of being creative has been reduced to something which should fit into this handful of categories, anything which is otherwise will not even be given an outlet as it might disturb the digestion of the masses.
We consume and, in turn, we are consumed by the companies behind the products pouring through our households like a flood of metamphetamines giving us a momentary fix, a distraction from the nagging sense of wrongness which develops into stress, nervousness, aggression, and addiction. We are reduced to complicated beasts of burden with little or no chance of forming a true soul. Bound to the worldly mechanics with only half of our self functioning, the dangerous, beautiful, and free element of self, the pure Being, having been disabled, we crawl about waiting to finally not exist, dreaming about heavens where the master will give us more of what we like to eat, but we wont have to pay for it.
This is the terrible harvesting of unformed souls taking place now on this little planet whirling around a yellow star. The culture of death and decay is most prevalent here and infectiously seeks every pocket of resistance so that it may submit and snuff out any possibility for life.

The Elsinore Princess

I have lately made very good friends with a big green reptile with razor sharp teeth and a hefty appetite. What he hungers mostly for is watermelon, and purple cabbage, and green grapes, but now and again he pretends to want to eat from my hand just so he can get a taste of my fingers to determine whether or not he’d be better off just eating me and forgoing all social niceties. Here in this special place, he looks at me from behind alloyed bars and nods to his empty food dish while I try to press all of the stray voices out of my head…
I am the lake Elsinore princess, imported from Long Beach to be made a spectacle of in a mud hole imbued with mystical powers. From my glass bottom, the denizens of this fair town have enjoyed looking down past their sandals at the murky green water fed by over 300 hidden springs and the San Jacinto river. When it dried up before 1880, Charlie Sumner still lived in the old adobe Machado house, built by that late great Californio, Augustin Machado himself. Then it transgressed to the rank of puddle, lost at the center of a pestilent pit of mud laden with decaying fish, their eyes eaten out by the very gnats that they themselves had once supped upon. The cattle got stuck in the muck in search of water, and there they mooed mournfully until the heat did them in. Then the gnats could start on them too, joined by the turkey vultures and crows, who cleaned away the carcass until only the bones gleamed white under the glaring sun, before returning to their post in the big blue sky, circling and waiting for the next bovine to expire. At the heart of the puddle a small geyser erupted and a fount of sulfurous water the color of blood gushed wretchedly, flaunting itself before the thirsty herds.
The Mexicans and the Indians had the smarts to stay clear, they know the work of a demon when they see it, but old Sumner wasn’t fazed. With a bit of British tenacity and a fair helping of humor, he set to poking around the choking little valley with a walking stick striped from a water starved cotton wood. Determined to make the best of a curse, he engaged in an exploration of the dried up lake bed, taking care not to get swallowed up in the gunk like a common cow, and thus he discovered those more than 300 secretive springs.
Oh, he had known about one or two of these geothermal water holes before the lake up and evaporated. He’d even tried to fence one off to keep the cows from drinking the hot stinking water, but one of his Indian vaqueros kindly informed him that the water was good for the cows, and that they were drinking it because they were sick, so Sumner bottled it up and sent it off to Los Angeles to be analyzed by a bonefide chemist, and lo! The chemist verified officially what the native had known without the use of a test tube, (which just goes to show- there’s no better way to get good help than to beat and enslave an indigenous people with a little help from the Catholic church).
At any rate, no Mexican has ever set foot on my clean glass bottom, except for the woman that cleans it and her son, a clever handyman. Only clean white feet have had the honor of dancing around on me after a wedding. I am after all, a movie star. Well, I was in one movie anyway, and the stars delivered their lines to one another while standing on me, and that is probably more than you can say. They dragged me overland to set me down on this little pea soup lagoon, and here I’ve been moored ever since.
Once upon a time, I ferried folks around Santa Catalina Island and the briny sea lapped at my chops. They retired me though, and sent me to die where everything else dies, here at the bottom of this valley. Everyone, every creature, every thing that has come here and died, came for the water and got stuck in the mud. This is how we have all met our fate; in search of water. They come for the water, and the water comes up from the hot depths of the earth, smelling of sulfur. How is it that no one has put two and two together? Didn’t they think that the devil would ask a price for his warm life giving elixir?
They used to cart people down here in wheelchairs to dip them in the lake. The hot sulfur ran from the tap in every house in the valley until the 1960’s turning the children’s teeth yellow. At the bathhouse built in 1884 they built a swimming pool in the 1920’s. A little boy drowned in it though, (I’m told he was an idiot anyway) and after that they filled it up. But you see, he came for the water too.
And what is water, my precious? Tell me that. What is water in a dream? The water and the sun set to work on me long ago, eating away the paint, rotting my wood. I fell apart in the wetness. They had me dismantled, because the water had made me unstable, unsafe. Now, if you want to see me, you will have to look through ghost eyes. Pick any that you like, those of a cow, those of an idiot boy at the bottom of a pool, those of an old gambler that died alone in a trailer near the lakes shore, or those of a prostitute wandering away from the old rodeo grounds where her remains were hidden among many. Look through any pair of dead eyes that you choose and you may see me moored out on the Laguna Grande, a phantom on a liquid bed of diamonds, paddlewheel still and silent under the moon’s ivory glow.

Quiet Place

In a quite hidden place, a place just barely missed by white padres and Spanish soldiers on their excursions in search of a new home for yet another one of their adobe Missions, which they planned to introduce throughout that great hot oven called California with the same zeal as those that would come later to fill it up with golden arches and Wal-Marts, crispy French fries, greasy slabs of processed meat product on white buns drowning in maroon pools of salty tomato render, matching short and T-shirt sets in hideous floral patterns with a few loose threads left dangling because Ming was very distracted as she worked, worrying that the pennies she was earning would not be enough to prevent her husband from selling their daughter into prostitution- in this quiet hidden place, the water sparkled, birds fished in the reeds and antelope grazed along its warm shore.
When white people talk about a place, we talk about its beginning as the moment in which we, the great white race came along and began the tedious work of defiling and reducing it to nothing more than a series of plaster cubes and parking lots. If we are extra gracious, we mention that there were some other humanoid life forms dwelling in that place before we rode in, Injuns, and that is what we commonly consider prehistory. However, this quiet hidden place had a history before the Pai ah che were a people, before they left the banks of the Colorado river and wandered into a little valley, circled by purple mountain ranges with a wee little puddle sinking down at its center, and decided to stay. Before this place was Etengvo Wumoma, its only name was that uttered when a breeze passed through and sent the leaves of cottonwood trees a’ shivering with delight. It was defined only by the eerie wailing of coyotes in the foothills, or the occasional scream of a puma. The sun baked dirt and dried grasses held still and silent, offering no utterance to define themselves. Occasionally though, the wind had her fun with them too, and then the parched dusts would be lifted up from the rock hard terra like a lady’s night dress lifted up and off, and the wind would whirl it round and round until she had made a devil of it, setting it free to spin like a top, knocking tumbleweeds aside like marbles before it was at last spent and allowed to settle back down on the hard body of earth.
Void of the chattering of three brained apes of any color or degree of spinal erectness, this place had a life of its own. It was ruled by spirits of an unruly and completely incomprehensible nature. Neither you, nor I, who can decipher, understand, and dream dreams inspired by the ideas conveyed through this assemblage of symbols, (whether we see them in print or digitized upon a liquid crystal screen) can even begin to grasp at the existence of such spirits. Their motives are entirely unlike our motives. They will never be released in death. Therefore they have none of the fears or concerns that dominate the minds of beings which must struggle and strive to exist and self perpetuate. No, these things will endure, and their fears, if they could fear, would be different from our own.
If they could dream, they could fear. If they could dream, perhaps then they could have imagined or foreseen what would become of their very body, their corporation of earth, fire, wind, and water. If they could have imagined a future, then they could have had a moment for fright. But they can only know the present in intimate detail. They can only find themselves channeled into the fiber optics of massive glowing arches and fluorescent tubes of light. They can only feel themselves flowing from rusty faucets into waxy paper vessels that touch monkey lips before they go coursing down into the belly of a beast, where at last they can take some revenge before eventually finding themselves expelled into a porcelain bowl to be sent spiraling down into dark pipes and into a vat somewhere where they can meet and mingle with chlorine and some limited filtration before being sent to another rusty faucet. They can only feel the weight of asphalt and tons of steel rushing over their skin.
Once mighty, once free, now subjected to tortures inflicted upon them by lesser beings than they, these spirits can know no end to their woe. As we white men go about applying for loans and slapping up mini malls and tracks of residential housing, and writing down the history of a place we have named and regarded as our own, it is entering our systems in ways so subtle that few of us would dare to imagine it. Beware the land that has endured the humiliation of domestication. Those spirits will be ever making the careless monkeys pay for the silence that they have swallowed up with their chattering. They make us pay for the quiet hidden place that we have erased from existence with our banter and banknotes.
Our greatest enemy is that one which we have just conquered. Now that we have digested our rival’s flesh, how do we intend to protect ourselves from it, now that it has become a part of us? How do we intend to combat the inevitable experience of indigestion that accompanies the consumption of an unwilling party?

Pattern Release

What does it mean to go back in time to the place of your origin, to find the world of your inception crystallized like a snowflake, complete with houses outfitted with sagging paint chipped porches frowning out at the dark damp woods and cemeteries, with their rounded head stones like uneven teeth, marked with esoteric symbols, the meanings of which have been buried beneath centuries of linguistic refuse? Can you remember when you and I were one and we danced beneath those trees in a frenzied whirlwind of bare chested ecstasy, our moonlight dappled cheeks glistening with sweat, the claws of the she-bear dangling from our necks, the blood of our loins smeared down our legs?
That was in the forest of our ancestors, in the womb of our mother, a world suspended in a crystal ball, preserved in a moment before the Romans came with their gold plated armor and their eagle crest. We beat them back there, in that forest. We defined the wilderness and the barbaric heart of the untamable darkness. Their solar enterprise, their overwhelming empire, would not penetrate into the cold chaos of annihilation, because we held them back. We drew the line, and we draw it still, the line that marks the place where civilization and the rule of the word may not enter.
We maintain the balance of the universe, keeping to our backs the shadows and the roar of endlessness while holding at bay with the fierceness of our visage the structures of the finite and mortal world with its sterile "one size fits all" laws and walls and limits. We will not be limited. We will smile as they close in on us and pretend to be a part of their game while still holding the limitless behind our backs. We will flip creation on its head so that the limitless flows into the limited, a viral infection spreading through unsuspecting carriers who will hold our secret sign and keep alive our secret dances without knowing what it is that they harbor. Moving like pawns across a chessboard, each game piece is destined for death, but how few of them realize that they are a helpless character in a Holy War? Few look ahead to their deaths, fewer still know on which side of the battlefield they stand, but despite their ignorance all are engaged in a Jihad that has been waged through every possible pattern of life for eternity.
It is a battle older than humanity, the struggle between fire and ice, and it has worked its way through every doe eyed little girl gazing out at the brilliance of the morning star embedded in the velvet fabric of night and through every quick lad springing into action to capture a frog in the ever flowing stream of consciousness. In the middle, betwixt and within the two, we have persevered. Concealed in the mechanical stupor inherent in being a living organism, our secret has been stowed like a rat in the ships cargo hold, waiting for the moment when it can bring its disease to a new world, waiting to destroy civilization in that moment when you and I are one again.
Why not suckle from the teat of the she-bear, the white dragon, and take in the poison of death to watch your eyes turn a steely gray as they begin to see in two directions at once? We have found the pattern for our creation nestled in the cradle of our origin. We have come back to the past to touch our beginning and re-make ourselves. First know thyself, and then make yourself in your own image. Only then will you be a free agent, a maker, a builder. Only then will you be eternal, the serpent nursing on its own tail, a dragon of a dragon born.

Resistance

Oh the resistance, coiling itself around me like a valuer blanket tangled about drowsy legs; just as I think I will at last generate a wee bit of electricity, I encounter one gauzy soft distraction after another. Even now, I am hearing the most ridiculous new age movie sound track imaginable, and it is my own fault. I perused through the CD selection. Just a handful of titles there- mostly classic rock, The Who, Pink Floyd, The Cream, but me, I thought it would be best to work without lyrics. Now I am soaring through a pg13 Disney movie, and I’m ready to vomit. Now I realize that Pink Floyd or Bjork would have been a great deal more acceptable. I can stop what I’m doing and attempt to adjust my environment…I do and the Pink Floyd case is empty, the Bjork disc won’t play. So you see, here every move you make is countered with some minor obstacle, and there is always an easier alternative, the consumers alternative; eat something, watch something, take a nap and wait for death.
It is a wonderful warm sticky tropical weather that holds me in pleasant suspension. The sun hides behind one of the many small puffy clouds that speckle the sky like a flock of lambs peacefully munching blue all the while growing fatter and fatter. In the background a voice cackles loudly in a one way exchange, a telephone conversation, no doubt, as there are many, "Uh huh"s, and "Yeah"s, and "Right"s between questions such as, "How many tenants do you have?" and "How much are your utilities?"
Other voices too coming from another room. One deep and rough and one small and high, both adrift in the electric hum of computer terminals. These two voices are similar, strangely alike despite the fact that one obviously belongs to an older man and the other to a little girl.
"You do? You know what the phrase ‘window of opportunity’ means already?" The older voice asks.
"Yes. Yes." The little girl voice insists. Outside the window birds sing, a car horn beeps and an air plane drones by. There is a soothing rushing sound like that heard in close proximity to crashing surf. It is the never ending river of traffic coursing over a nearby freeway overpass. A breeze rustles the leaves of the elm tree and palms shading the window. Far away down the street a little dog barks, a hollow, gravely bay. I lean back and scratch my chin. What else is there to say? I could go into great detail describing the fibers of the dark green carpet besieged by tiny white hairs and balls of lint. Even though there are fresh lines left where a vacuum recently passed over its plush mane, there are still small clingy things holding onto its minuscule loops. Now the cackling woman voice from the phone conversation speaks to the old man voice.
"That was a mental institution." She says. "The state pays them $900 a month to board each resident."
"God." Says the old man, "Why would anyone do that?"
"Because she loves them." Says the woman, "She says that anyone who goes into the business of caring for these people should do it because they love them. They need someone to love them. She says no one should even consider doing it for the money. You have to love them."
There is a bit of silence. Plenty to eat, plenty to drink, comfort, and rest. What else is there?