The Parallel Planet

Big Three-Headed River

2011-12-29T00:41:00.002-06:00

A single dusty lamp lights a long hallway in an old woman's mansion.
She sits in the living room by the firelight in the evening, knitting a sweater for someone with knobby fingers, but the neck doesn't look quite right. You wonder if it's poor lighting or maybe your eyesight or your mind, but you look closer and no, your mind has not slipped and it’s not the light or your eyes; the sweater has three holes for three heads. You want to put your hand on her delicate shoulder and reassure her, but you fear that whatever it is that she contracted is highly contagious and you pull your hand back and put it in your pocket. “Nice fire.”
Jack walked out of the living room and shook his head. He took off his bifocals and held them up to the lamp. "I swear I saw the fellow who wears that sweater in a temple in India. Had a cup of rice in front of him." He rolled up his sleeves. "Poor fella didn't touch it. Didn't move a muscle. People had to carry him around on poles."
I always liked listening to Jack. He was like an old leather suitcase with decals from faraway lands, a walking travel brochure, and he had an easy way of conversation. You could ignore him for a while as he exhumed tales of colonnades and big game and tribes and fever and then jump into the conversation for a while and then ignore him again as he described man-eating reptiles and jungle kings and he never seemed to notice or care. "I thought the sweater would have six arms."
"That's probably right. Maybe I saw the guy at the state fair. Or up front in a cathedral. That’s right." He held his glasses at arm’s length and swiped a lens with his right thumb. "It must be this. All I see is dust."
The flooring creaked beneath my feet. "Which state fair?"
"I can’t recall." He blew on his glasses. "Oops. That dust was the original owner of the house and there, away he goes, off into the air, maybe all the way to heaven. I must show proper respect." The old woman started to cough.
“I think the original owner is everywhere.”
He did a slight bow before his glasses. “That’s what you call omnipresence, my boy.” He looked at the firelight down the hall, "I'll go stoke the fire," and walked into the living room.
As he walked away, I thought about the forgotten state and wondered why it would be such a likely place for three-headed people. Jack always had the appearance of being hot on the trail of something, even if he wasn’t; sort of like a toothless old Labrador retriever barking up a tree full of abandoned squirrel nests. But if there were more triune people in that state why would they be considered such an oddity as to display to gawking mobs at the fair? Maybe there were fewer three-headed people there than the average; they were a vanishing species, a real rarity. I read about a gated community once where everyone had recessive genes dangling from their mortal shell in fantastic ways. So I wondered which states were surrounded by gates. I knew some city-states had moats. Out here they used levees. But they didn’t stop anything; just as soon as we built them, the river cut across a gooseneck upstream and changed course and ambled about the land behind the levee, filling up Main Street so many times we renamed the town Venice. I felt the urge to move wherever that state was and find out for myself. Maybe I would get a job as a freakish one-headed man housed behind glass in the front of a cathedral, chained next to the marble man with three heads and six arms, fed balls sweet rice on banana leaves by pilgrims bearing candles. This is when I began to wonder if there was such thing as a phantom head.
The noise of Jack rattling the fireplace utensils interrupted my deep thoughts. This was Jack's first time in this house in twenty years, since he was in college studying liquor. The old woman muttered something about the fireplace and Jack replied loudly, "Destroyer. The destroyer." He must have been talking about his days with the Merchant Marines off the Atlantic coast. I could see the fire reflecting off of the walls of the living room, bright enough to signal planes flying overhead. "Hey!” I shouted. "Save some light for tomorrow." A few hours later he fell asleep on the sofa in front of the fire, which had retired as well, reduced to a few shy embers, winking like red stars on a summer night.
The following morning crept into the sky slowly, no sudden, bright, sunny fanfare as one would hope, more gradual, like the way color fades from a fish washed up on a beach. Jack was standing in the back yard. "Where is the light? Is it cloudy here all the time? You forget to pay the electric bill?"
I shrugged. My shoulders felt heavy, both of them.
Rubbing his hands together, he surveyed the skies. "Man, it looks like a burial shroud, clouds from horizon to horizon. Nothing can see out and nothing can see in." He looked down at his feet, old deck shoes decorated with grass clippings, like parsley flakes on two cod filets. "As much as I want to see what might be up there, I can't imagine anyone wanting to see what was going on down here."
I thought about the old woman knitting. "Like the door to her basement."
"Yeah. We just think that there’s something valuable in there."
“I don’t want to know.” The old woman had lived in that house all her life, the daughter of the first owner, Mr. Shaunheunessey, who ran a lumber mill down by the river. She never married. I could see her sitting at her window knitting ever since I could remember. Sweaters and more sweaters and socks, hats, mittens, and scarves, I suppose. She must have made thousands of them over the decades, but nobody knew what she did with them. There were as many rumors as there were mouths. She gave them to charity, she sent them to orphanages, she clothed the monks at the monastery on the hill. She had relatives back in Europe. Maybe they were peasants and would have nothing but stiff, black rags to wrap around their feet and hands were it not for the package of woolens they received every fall. That wasn’t a house, it was a textile mill. The windows reflected the grey skies like cataracts.
The smoke rising from the chimney caught Jack’s attention. "Maybe the clouds are coming from us."
Something splashed in the river down below and we both turned. Nothing.
He put his hands in his pockets. "Or someone just closed the lid on us. How would I know?" We plodded across the front lawn toward the river.
He stopped. His face tightened. His open hand swept from right to left. "There!"
I followed the sweep of his hand and my eyes drifted to the river. Bleach bottles collected in an eddy. I started thinking about bleach bottles and I wondered what would happen if they were given enough time and given ideal conditions - an ammonia atmosphere with electrical discharges and some giant, strong, benevolent, philanthropic scientist hovering over the whole affair making sure that random events wouldn’t interfere with the rigorously controlled experiment and send it spinning out of control, destroying the atmosphere and engulfing the scientist in a superheated ball of ionized ammonia gas - I wondered if they would replicate. Bleach bottles laying eggs in the muck at the bottom of the river, laced with heavy metals. Prime habitat. The bleach bottle eggs would feed on the heavy metals and grow into nymph stage, then emerge from the primordial soap and shed their brittle, UV-degraded casing and float downstream. Adulthood is reached in two to three months and the males accumulate on the banks of the river in the stiff, phosphate foam, displaying for the females, expanding and contracting their cylindrical bodies, emitting hypochlorites, drawing the timid females out from the overhanging brush and tires and rusting cables and washing machines and -
Jack broke in. "Over here. The Lilliputian Forest, the industrial lawn, the engineered turf, managed for sustained yields, millions of dollhouse board feet, harvested every week by pale, flabby suburban farmers on toy tractors, a cheery, iridescent-green, like the felt on a pool table, an Irish festival, thatched with battle-hardened European and Asian strains, bathed in surplus chemicals produced in the last Great War." He pointed at the lawn.
Now I was looking at the lawn.
"This chemistry of war has a long history - in fact, you can quote me, it was conceived exactly twelve minutes after the discovery of fire, just enough time to finish the roast leg of auroch."
I squinted and for a second I thought I saw many small aurochs munching in the grass. "There!"
I don’t think he heard me, he was on the scent of something. "I suppose two men discovered fire but each one wanted the discovery for himself. Here, my friend, was the birth of the marketplace: First, a new and exciting product - Fire! But then, who would be the producer and who would be the consumer? Thus, the need for another product, one which determined market positions. And the market does not disappoint! The second new and exciting product - The Fire-throwing Device! After working out the glitches with a few trial runs, the market moves again! Now we have but one producer, and the consumer, well, he -he was, shall we say, consumed...but! The producer would have many, many children. And the marketplace grew and grew and lived on and on." Jack smiled broadly.
"Hey, Jack,” I asked, “Did you ever invent something?" We were at the river's edge.
Jack shook his head. "Nope. But I worked in a patent office in England once." He picked up a head-sized piece of concrete and heaved it into the river, sending up a fountain of greenish-grey.
"Maybe we can - "
"I think, if there was a patent office back when fire was introduced into the market, the proliferation of fire would have been prevented." Two fish surfaced near the splash, dark grey backbones rolling along like knobby tires. "I mean, I know that there was a day not too long ago when enemy assaults on castles and walled cities were repelled by dumping boiling oil from positions above the gates. Then naval battles were won by the feared Greek Fire; fountains of burning pine resin and sulfur vomiting from the mouths of brass lions on the prow of the ship. Terrifying. But consumer demands were strong, so naturally the markets produced new and improved terror: Jellied gasoline raining down from clear, blue skies, the Devil’s Thunderstorm, liquid fire that consumed palm-leaf villages and paper houses and their sleepy inhabitants. It's a growth market, this destruction business."
I looked out across the water, sudsy, like pureed avocado. "They always come up with something." I thought about a one-headed job opening in Indiana and traveling the byways in a circus caravan jammed with one-headed freaks, the eighth wonder of the world, arms dangling out the air holes, and then I thought about fishing from a boat that burns the surface of the water away leaving the fish on the hot lakebed roasted and ready to eat. We would have to use olive oil for the fuel, pressurize it and spray it across the glassy surface, light it with a torch, maybe before we spray it we mix it with some capers and salt and pepper, then heat it to about 450 degrees and sprinkle with crushed flat leaf parsley, and bake the lake for about 30 minutes until the skin is golden brown, but you could lay them on a banana leaf in which case you rub the fish in a mixture of lime juice and salt and then serve on a bed of rice and coconut milk. This is naval war on the low seas and it has no Geneva Convention rules, as far as I know, but it does require a license and the ability to keep a secret under torture because once your friends smell those fish they will twist you like a dishrag and bend you so hard you enter four dimensions in three pieces until you confess the name of the lake that you were burning away. I was getting hungry and I swallowed at the sight of the salad of lawn clippings, the loaves of firewood in the woodshed by the old woman’s gingerbread house, all the while rubbing the hams of my hand, prodding the sugar sand, my hands shaking at the sight of the beer-colored foam. I wondered if they had food detoxification centers; I was ready for a relapse.
"Here?" Jack laughed. "Are you kidding? Not 'till we burn everything in sight."
I frowned. "You did that last night."
“No, not there." As he scanned the skies, the deck shoes sank into the green mud. "If you could see far away, up there beyond the scattered, brilliant, blue light that lettered men tell me lies above the endless clouds in this dreary, stratus opacus gloomscape you call home, they say that large stars will burn through sequences of fuel, starting with hydrogen, then, in succession, helium, carbon, neon, and oxygen." Two fish surfaced again. Or was it three. "In the last, they will burn silicon."
"And?" I watched the low clouds slink across the treetops like a grey cat.
"Silicon is last," he continued. "It takes about a day and it is gone. Once that is burned up, nothing can be fused, and within a second” – snapping his finger - “the star collapses. Just like that. Sometimes it explodes - a supernova." He scanned the skies again. "Out there. It's pretty, bright, and short-lived."
Like a fight, I thought, when the fist hits your temple and the whole world turns bright white.
"There is where is next."
"You say where? There?" I pointed at the grass.
"Right. At our feet are tiny palm-leaf villages with paper thin homes and sleeping inhabitants, the sly nematodes, brave arachnids, honorable springtails, dutiful dung beetles, cheery sowbugs, and millipedes, centipedes, slugs, and snails - regiments of hardy exoskeletal creatures which, were we reduced to their scale, would exterminate the whole race of us – revenge killings - each and every soft, pliable man, woman and child, using our gelatinous remains to grow bales of fungi that they would feed to their fertile queens."
That was no auroch I saw in the grass; it might have been a giant scarab beetle. I stroked my throat with my fingers. "I want to fight back."
"Sure." Jack gave me a nod. "We all do. They go about their day unaware, oblivious to what positions itself above them. And then we ambush them, dropping out of thin air. We attack these things with the same ruthlessness that we attacked enemy infantries of old as they marched across pastures and farmlands beneath happy, blue skies. The heavens opened up and we rained down vats of hot chemicals like brimstone and boiling oil and napalm." He kicked the grass. "Today, innovation and efficiency have created yet another superior product: we open the bomb bay doors on the enemy and unload a witch’s brew of hydrodynamic fronts, electromagnetic pulse, ionizing radiation and thermal flash." He paused. "The sky is the limit, son. If you can't compete in this marketplace, you have no place to be and no place being." He folded his arms and glared at the lawn.
A splash. There were those two fish – no three fish - again. They were fighting over something. But back to the lawn. "The lawn?"
“All my life this world has been a playground, my backyard. But there are only so many things to burn. We have gone through pine tar, saltpeter, naptha, quicklime, sulfur, niter and now plutonium." He pokes a dead bird on the shore with his shoe. "It's not 'What's next?' It's 'What's left?' Something is out there that is the silicon of this cold, iron stone that we live on."
“Maybe we already burned it.”
Jack turned his head toward me, squinting. He studied my face. His mouth was open and he wanted to say ‘What?’ but no words were coming out.
We stood looking at each other. A minute passed. I didn’t know what to say, he didn’t say anything. A hundred fish could have walked out of that river and set up communal living with the dung beetles and flatworms but we wouldn’t have noticed. “Jack?” My neck felt hot. Still no words, but I knew what he was trying to say. “Jack, I mean, I don’t know, maybe we used it up already.” I thought about that Labrador retriever barking at an empty squirrel’s nest in a dead tree in the winter at night by himself in an atmosphere depleted of oxygen and a blackened sun unable to give warmth or light. I think the dog was blind and deaf and a seizure was coming on. And I thought about beaches, that the beaches are covered in silicon. There is no end to sand. I find it in my clothes and shoes and food. It blows and carves out rock sculptures and it stacks a thousand feet high in deserts and buries ancient cities. They say the number of stars exceeds the grains of sand on earth. Hourglasses are filled with sand and the glass is made of sand. If you burn sand it turns to glass. I didn’t know what to think. My eyes focused on Jack but he was gone, heading up toward the old woman’s house. “Jack. Hey. Hey, where you going?”
“The old woman.”
There was that splash again. A fish chomped onto a bleach bottle, shook it back and forth and pulled it underwater. A sound, like sloop and a few bubbles and it was gone. Two minutes later bits of plastic rose to the surface and then some large bubbles. Alligators do the same thing; they shake the victim, drag it underwater, dismember it and drown it. Or is it the other way around. That’s when I noticed that the sand at my feet was very big. It was mixed with millions of bits of broken plastic bottles, oxidized, irradiated, abraded, and I was standing on a semi-man-made beach, very colorful. Too much quartz to call it an unspoiled, anthropogenic man-scape, but give it a few more years, just a few more years of this synthetic saturation-bombing, this mad-chemistry, and imagine what it would look like. And two-hundred years in the future, why, with all the sand washed away - it was going to be pristine, pure, a breathtaking polymeric paradise. A thousand automatons in a laboratory somewhere turned their faces toward me and smiled.
Eons beyond, into the distant future, after a zillion floods and channel diversions, and tectonics elevated the landscape upstream an additional two-thousand feet above sea level, this old beach would be buried beneath a thousand feet of debris. Then, some sunbaked paleontologist would unearth the hardened strata and, wafting away the chlorinated outgasses with an old, cotton towel, find my fossilized footprints and declare me primitive man. I could see the vestigial fingers on my left hand fumbling with the vestigial fingers on my right and I could not bear to look. Rudimentary, degenerate, like fat, pink crayons. Stop it. I turned away. They might as well have been hooves. But I had to wonder just what they were doing. I had no ready answers. And yet, this thought did not stop them from doing whatever it was that they were doing over and over again and for a moment I considered tossing one of them away for simplicity. This is not where I wanted things to go and I quickly rubbed my footprint out with my left foot. Wilderness ethics, Leave no trace, right? Of course, the right foot quickly made a new footprint and I knew I could not control my feet either. I could see an automaton in the lab, smiling and I was hot with jealousy.
Upstream somewhere, tiny particles of quartz sloughed off in the raging battle between water and rock and drifted downstream. The sales pitch is that plastics are maintenance free, no thought or effort required, and soon I was going to fit right in just like -
A splash. The fish broke the surface, snagged a plastic bag out of the air and cut back into the river and I swore it had three heads.
At that moment, I heard Jack shout as he ran back from the house. “Hey! I had to ask the lady. I had to ask her what she did with all the sweaters.”
He beat me to it; I had always wanted to ask her that question. “And?”
“She said, ‘What sweaters?’ I thought she was being coy, so I said, ‘I know how you’ve helped so, so many unfortunate souls. What’ve you done with all the sweaters you’ve made over the years?’ She said, ‘I only make this one. Only this one.’ I said, ‘But what about the others?’”
Words jumped out of my mouth, “Charity, she must have given them to charity.” Come on, lady, I thought, Say you gave them to charity.
Jack took a breath. “Then she said it again, ‘I only make this one, only this one.’ I don’t get what she means. And so I looked closer, and I see that she was taking the sweater apart, unraveling it knit by purl, one knit by one purl, one knit by one purl. And then her hands, they are calloused like a sailor’s and full of Gordian knots and pock marks, like yellow golf balls melted together. And then she said - get this: ‘And when I am done, I only make this one again, only this one, and when I am done I only make this one again, only this one, and when I am done...’ She kept saying that over and over and over and I see she is going to make that sweater all over again and I had to get out of there so I jumped up and ran out the back door.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead. "I didn't see this. Did I really see this? This is uncharted territory.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” We stared the house. “What is she doing?”
His body leaned slightly, away from the house. “Let’s get out of here.”
I looked up. It was almost noon but it was still a dreary grey. I felt like we were being watched. Maybe it was the old woman, maybe someone else. I didn’t know. I looked at the river. Then the treetops. I could barely speak. “Jack. Look." I pointed. "Those aren’t clouds up there. It's smoke. All this time it’s been smoke.”

Bedtime Story

2011-12-09T02:36:00.002-06:00

My first floor windows on the east side of my house had an excellent view of the first floor windows on the west side of my neighbor's house. The view was so complete that, while I sat in my living room in my reading chair by the east window, I could yawn and stretch my left arm and reach into his living room and trade books. If only for the window screens. The same was true on the west side but I did not care for her cheap romance novels.

One brilliant and wrathfully hot Wednesday morning, just shy of noon, I was sitting in the shade cheerfully swatting a breed of imported flies when Henry, my neighbor to the east, came down the sidewalk toward my patch of lawn carrying a box. Henry walked his way around town, having no car or license. He said that he couldn't drive because he was myopic, but his wife said that he was gloomy. He was whistling again. My ears stood straight up like a dog's. I rose in my chair. "Stop it, will you?" He glanced my way. He was in the third bar of some byzantine, baroque fugue in descending minor that was elevating my blood pressure. "I said stop it. Can't you find something else to do with that excess windage and fattened tongue besides misinterpret Vituperatio or Balooney or Paparazzi or whomever it is you mock?"

He stopped right in the arc of the lawn sprinkler. "I whistle when I am tense. I've got to shed some excess nerves." The sprinkler swept across his back. "Yow - cold!" He jumped aside.

"Well shed them in the fall so they can blow down to Alabama with the rest of the litter on my lawn." I nearly stood up to impress, but I was really hoping that he would pass along too quickly for me to rise. "Anyhow, what's the angst about now?" Never a day passed without his complaint about his nerves.

He looked at me sideways. "Job applications." He had been unemployed for about two years and was looking for work.
I relaxed in the chair. "Any leads?" I looked down at the ants crawling across the driveway that sizzled in the hot sun, tar oozing from the cracks like black summer sweat. The ants would make it about an arm's length into the driveway and then overheat and swell and turn on their backs and then die, legs outstretched. And many of the dead were rescue teams sent to recover the remains of the first casualties. Carcasses piled up. Maybe this was a plan; they would use the dead as bridges to the netherworld on the other side of the driveway where all wood was soggy with rot and the aphids were plump. I looked across the shimmering asphalt and saw ants on the other side working their way toward this side in the same fashion. I wondered what it must have felt like to be on a suicide mission to save another suicide mission that is on a mission to save you.
He shrugged again. "Well, I figure with all my experience applying for jobs, I could get a job looking at applications for job openings. They call it a Personnel Director."
I thought of Russian Nesting Dolls eating one another.
He saw my blank look. "I was interviewed for an opening in personnel at the airport today."
I raised my eyebrows. He looked away. "How did it go?"
He started whistling.
"Hey - "
"Sorry. I was relaxing." He looked at the box of papers. "They tested me today. They had me review applications for job openings for pilots." He paused and looked down and slowly shook his head. "I don't know. I don't get it."
"Get what?" I swatted at a fly that landed on my arm. It was about as big as a half dollar, glittering blue and green like a Vegas hotel with a rack of antennae that would have made a trophy elk run in fear.
He shook the box. "All the applicants were schoolchildren, from Mrs. William's second grade class. Some of the applications just had pictures drawn in crayon. Food stains. Ripped. Crumpled. I don't get it."
I smiled. "Were they qualified?"
His face curled slightly. "That's what I don't get. I was told that they were serious candidates." There he stood, sweating, dehydrating in the hot white sun, losing weight, height and volume, holding a box of crayon drawings of stick men created by the brightest leaders of tomorrow, and tomorrow would begin in precisely 12 hours, coincidentally, the very moment when our world would be at its darkest.
I began to whistle.
Henry tipped his head to the side. "You sound myopic."
I got up and went into the house.
At about ten at night - it must have been ten o'clock because the news was on television and panels of pale men with swollen necks and carnivorous women with dilated pupils dressed in business suits were championing in great detail personal versions of a future reality in ever increasing volume and cacophony. Like a cage full of parrots. About ten at night I sat down to watch the news.
Henry looked out his window into my window. He was watching the same program, or maybe he wasn't because the background colors were different. "I am watching an action movie."
"No you aren't. It's the news."
He looked at his television. "Nah, it's an action movie. You're wrong."
"No, you are wrong."
"It has to be. At the end of this there is always a loud explosion and bodies fly all over the place and the next day I go see the sequel and I see the same set of actors scrubbed and cleaned and powdered do it all over again."
I picked up a book on the end table and tried to read but I forgot that the pages went from left to right and besides, I read it several years earlier. It was a science fiction novel from the 1950's entitled The Eyestorm, about a future that is now long past, one where everyone drives a flying car, motivational music is omnipresent, the moon is cultivated, communities are arranged vertically, and the state wages war against every second thought. Well, I had misgivings about the book when I opened it, but I was afraid to put it down and finished it in a few hours. Afterward, I closed the blinds on the windows.
"See?" Henry pointed at the screen and there was chaos and shouting and the camera cut away to a commercial. "See?"
On the west side of the house I could hear the other neighbor reading a bedtime story to her daughter. I think she read it every Wednesday evening, a book called The Big Red Airplane. The heroine, a young girl named Darcy, takes the controls of a big red airplane when the pilot oversleeps and she flies it around the world so many times that they go forward in time and find a civilization where everyone is literate and animals have rights and houses talk to you and, sure enough, they have flying cars, and the President calls on Darcy to save the city from a family of angry asteroids by sending the asteroids back in time so they miss the earth. This reminds me why I sit on the east side of the house. I had half-a-mind to tell that daughter the real story, and I made sure I let her mother know that I had half-a-mind - and she agreed - and I was fully determined to tell her that the civilization that Darcy saved went on to revoke the rights of animals so that they could use them to fuel their flying cars and all the people could read alright, but became immersed in abject sloth and bliss and their ability to write and create atrophied - but this condition didn't last long because their immune systems were no match for the mutant bacteria that were out-gassing from the genetics laboratories. Besides, the President was the one that sent the asteroids so he could declare a State of Emergency and force a social contract whereby the citizens would give up their inalienable rights in exchange for virtual reality, libations, and the pursuit of pleasure. Darcy was just a pawn and died in prison with hundreds of other children held for their charming, little beliefs.
That was about three years ago. She only recently unlocked her first floor window and opened the drapes.
Henry was still watching the news. He looked over. "You know, these men and women on this show look like they are aware and sentient and lucid. One would imagine they had a conscience."
"So?" I looked at the newspaper. A headline read, "Scientists Discover Royal Family Is Genetically Identical to Sausage Links".
Henry continued. "Really, they all use abstract terms and assert their moral certitude. It's a good movie."
"Would you quit calling it a movie! It's not a show, it's a discussion, experts finding solutions."
"That's a good movie." Henry leaned back in his chair and took a swig of water. "I am cheering for the fat fellow on the left there. See him? He can really act. I am almost convinced he really believes he has solutions."
I looked past him at the television. It was a different channel, but they had the same position players, one aging wise man, a blonde woman with sharp eyebrows, a dark-eyed man with a cherubic face, smart haircut, dark hair clipped above the ears and parted on the side. Another puffy, arteriosclerotic man with thick jowls and bulging eyes who sweated and lost his temper first. Once he lost it, the others followed. That was the explosive climax. I think I saw a headline go across the screen about an asteroid.
Henry tapped on the window screen. "Hey. Lincoln said that the legitimate object of a government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do for themselves in their separate and individual capacities."
He said it too fast for me to catch it all. "What?"
He watched the experts shouting above each other. "I am saying that we need more than single-issue Messiahs. I mean, we have five-thousand and seventy-nine critical issues we need to solve simultaneously. One for every man, woman, and child on earth and all these folks can do is shout simultaneously."
I still had trouble hearing him over the din.
He placed his drink on the end table. Moths hit the screens between us. "Unfortunately, Lincoln had to bathe and eat and take naps and comfort his wife and retrieve the keys he misplaced in the icebox and hang out with his relatives when they brought 'possum from Illinois and then go sleep for eight or ten hours and then miss an appointment with the ambassador to Spain because he forgot about it and his teeth were aching oh-so-badly that he had to put down more corn whiskey than he was accustomed to and that was where the Vice President would step in, if only they could wake him up from his slumber after being up all night playing poker with the Speaker of the House and the Secretary of State. They say he lost his shirt and redistricting in Vermont."
The television switched to breaking news from somewhere. Headlines and war scenes appeared. "Peace Marchers Set Fire to Nursing Home."
Henry looked at me. "Are you listening, bud?" I gave a vague shrug. "Think about it: What was Gandhi's policy on health care? What did MLK have to say about child slavery? What did Cyrus the Great think about drug resistant pathogens? And Peter the Great, I wonder what his platform was on groundwater depletion? I suppose that man had the time to come up with something." He looked back at the television. "Yeah, great show."
"Maybe it is, but maybe they are lost in the character and really are what they appear to be."
"For enough money, anyone will be what they are not. These people make a living convincing people they are someone other than themselves." He leaned back and ran his fingers through his hair. "Nah. They will sort things out when they hand out the Emmy Awards." He pointed at the screen. "Well for the love of Pete..." A headline appeared: "Aurora Borealis More Active Around Pet Cemeteries."
Before I could think I blurted, "I believe that!" I backed into my chair. "I mean, I think I have seen that happen in Rosemont, along Highway 63." I looked at the end table. Seven dead flies were on the table. One was caught in the glass housing around the lamp and was burning alive.
"And the show goes on." Henry turned off the television. "I mean, this Machiavellian landscape is overpopulated with also-rans, thugs, megalomaniacs, sycophants, honyokers, and ruffians, many of which are engaged in such villainous acts of compulsive-destructive behavior that new problems at created at such a rate that they outstrip the ability of all the genetic laboratories in the earth to produce cloned Gandhi-like figures in numbers equal to the task."
I raised my hand. "But maybe they could appear to be up to the task. That would at least create security, right?"
I don't think he heard me or maybe he did. Moths swirled in the lamplight like snow. He continued, "Let's be fair. Maybe one of these leaders could multitask. So let's ask, What was Julius Caesar's policy on alternative fuels, nuclear waste, habitat destruction, species extinction, petroleum based farming, corporate greed, internet pornography, school violence, the drug trade, wetland loss, factory farms, consumerism, hyperinflation, quantitative easing, landfill seepage, racism, and the weapons trade? Oh, and I forgot, failing infrastructure. I want to see his mission statement too. By tomorrow at the end of the business day. Four copies please. And it had better make sense. No gimmicks. Consistent, integrated, no contradictions, comprehensive and fully funded. Leave it on my desk."
I laughed. "Don't bet on it. He probably has to take a powder and rehearse his lines."
He nodded. "Yeah, but I hear he has a great smile and a full head of hair."
I sighed and sunk back into my chair, relaxed. "Man, I am glad these folks aren't real. If they were we would be doomed." I looked at the clock. "Hey, it's already midnight."

Separation, Alignment, Cohesion

2011-11-10T00:02:00.008-06:00

Someone tells me to be somewhere at sometime, something I did not want to do. Despite this, I was there, on time.
That is where and when I met an old helicopter pilot, Fuzzy "Buzz" Wildster. He used to fly the helicopter over the city that monitored the rush-hour traffic. He would call in his observations to a prominent radio station and they would broadcast them on-air. I remember that his voice sounded just like short-wave radio static; it conjured an image of an unshaven man with wiry, electrified hair and sluggish thick and calloused lips and tongue. The station believed that Fuzzy's reports would help commuters take the least crowded route to their destination, but from the ground it never worked out that way. Sitting in that traffic day after day, hearing his voice over the radio directing traffic to the east then west then to overpass and underpass and lane closure, all it served to do is confirm that I was on the worst possible road and there would be no way out for the foreseeable future.This went on for about 30 years. That distorted voice from the whirling clouds above, like a Russian Jamming Signal, giving directions that nobody could follow, warning motorists of perils that they could not avoid, describing to hundreds of thousands of commuters the suffocating and intractable morass into which they had descended. A human tragedy played out on asphalt each weekday morning and afternoon. Why didn't anyone try to stop it?

Near the end of his career, tiring of describing traffic density and determining least congested routes, he ventured into polemics on the morality of various traffic patterns, direction of flow, automobile speed and spacing. During his last year on-air he pronounced judgments upon the vehicles themselves, railing against automobile colors, the shadows cast by trucks, and random skid marks. He found sunroofs to be particularly odious: "They engulf sunlight!"
Well, hearing this every day for years had an effect, and I experienced Motorist's Regret: that prolonged state of sorrow, where color drains out of the world, every image is a grainy negative, your feet are like concrete blocks, as if you are dragging dead weight to the morgue. I felt unspecified guilt, like non-point pollutants, mind-eating bacteria dispersing from the rows of crowded human feedlots downtown. I felt the need to unburden myself, to talk to a trusted friend. And I was not alone. I saw people praying as they changed lanes. Dashboard idols proliferated. Support groups formed. Many listeners contemplated monastic life, heads bowed deep in penance and remorse. Once I called the Highway Traveler Crisis Hotline for relief but the lines were jammed. Somewhere out there I expected that my futile lane choices and inappropriate speed were destined to end in a horrific, slow-motion ball of fire that the firemen could never put out.

Last week I came across Fuzzy as he was exiting the county courthouse. As he moved the heavy oak door, it bumped my shoulder. I said Ouch, he said, "Oh - sorry, I didn't see you coming." I recognized his face from an interview in the newspaper on the day he retired. A forced retirement after a collision with a giant grain elevator west of the city. Flaming wreckage descended on a housing development below but somehow he managed to walk out of it with just a broken collarbone and a concussion.
"No problem. At least we only fall a few feet while standing on earth."
He scowled. "And I am stuck down here with people like you."
I chuckled. "Right where you sent me, six hours in the slow lane behind a smoking bus."
"And here is how I get somewhere I can't find you." He shoved past me and waddled down several steps, swirling his arms from side to side to steady his legs.
I called out, "Fuzzy, which way should traffic flow, clockwise or counterclockwise?"
He stopped cold. "Clockwise. Unless you are in the southern hemisphere." He looked back at me. "Why do you ask?"
"Why do you say so?"

"In South America, they go the opposite direction. I flew down there for a big city, doing publicity stunts, and I saw that the traffic flowed counter-clockwise."
I looked at my watch. "Maybe they are on the wrong side of the road."
"No, I don't think so, because the pedestrians are all going in the same direction. And they are all circling toward the center of town. And up here it is just the opposite." He leaned on the railing.
"Maybe we cancel each other out, balance the commuters in Argentina. Otherwise we might wind this planet as tight as a baseball core."
He looked sideways at the concrete steps. "Maybe - no. No. I don't know. I know I tried going backwards on the freeway once and they nearly killed me. I had no choice."
I looked at the shoppers and pedestrians marching from right to left. Everybody had their head down. Nobody was paired up. Individual, solitary pedestrians moving in one direction, toward some moving target, maybe a ballgame cancelled by a player's strike or a 50%-off clothing sale on clothes that were marked up 100% yesterday or a job opening that was filled by the personnel officer's nephew or a blue plate special at a restaurant that was closed by the FDA for Clostridium perfringens.
I got to thinking, was there someone at the front of the crowd who made the left or right turn that signaled the rest of the crowd to turn in that direction, or was the movement to the right or left the sum total of a multitude of interactions between individual pedestrians. Up above, the skyscraper windows reflected the dusty brown light from the setting sun. I could see spherical, suited executives looking down at me. "Fuzzy," I asked, "Why did you work with traffic?"
He looked away. A minute went by. "I had to take what I could. I had a wife and a baby on the way. They told me what my job was and I did it."
"Whatever they said?"
"Whatever they said."
In the twilight, the billboards started to light up. Across the city park, a 40-story office building had a billboard on the roof that advertised, "Choose Your Own Genetic Code - Don't Let Others Do It For You - Call GTI - Gene Therapeutics International." I felt vulnerable. I looked at Fuzzy. "If you had to do it over again - "
"- That question. It. I can't begin to think of it. I wouldn't recognize who I was back then and he sure didn't know me. I don't have that past anymore and for all I know it never happened." He pulled a liquor flask out of his coat pocket. He took a swig.
I looked back up at the windows. "They're still there."
Fuzzy slipped the flask back into his coat. "This mass movement, it's left, right, clockwise, counterclockwise, I don't think it matters which way it goes, it's just not like a flock of starlings anymore."
"What?"
"I mean birds."
"Where?" I looked at the windows on the 56th floor.
"Not up there, you fool. Out here. They say that we were once scaly, once feathered, once furry, once leathery. Not now. What do we have in common with anything on this planet anymore? Wasn't this struggle for survival supposed to result in an improved race? Something beyond this hairless epidermis." He tugged at the skin on his cheek. "Maybe plastic sheathing. Yeah. There is enough dissolving in our water supply to replace all of our organs with Styrofoam pellets. My kidney is recyclable. My brain won't sink. I have advanced." He took the flask out again and waved it in the air. "Perfection, it was supposed to bring perfection. Darwin said it, 'As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.' What, did they change the definition of perfection since they wrote that claim? It's like disappearing ink. A Cold War trick!" He took another swig. "Ah." He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "They are saying, 'I know what I meant back then but the words are evolving too.' This is bait-and-switch. Go ahead, sell me my own land while you are at it." He looked at me. "Now that I have been unfettered to live like an animal, how is it that I have become so unlike an animal? Just where are those confounded birds?" He looked up at the skyscraper, now bathed in light from the towers that surround it. Money was changing hands up there somewhere. Wealth was transferring. Enrichment, endowment, enhancement. Lives were improving. He shook the flask at the sky.
"I don't want to look anymore." I looked at my shoes, shiny quasi-leather shoes constructed by child labor in some war-ravaged land with smoking tires and mosquitoes breeding in mine craters and limbless old men begging for rice. For a second, I saw myself fifty years ago playing with toy cars on a white kitchen counter bathed in the white sunlight of a fresh spring day. The windows were open and the curtains moved slowly in the breeze.
Fuzzy put the flask back in his pocket. "Our mass movement isn't the same. No, it's alien, better suited to the surface of Venus than here. At least the hot sulfuric-acid thunderstorms would rinse us away. But here, we operate by laws not found anywhere else in the universe. Supply and Demand. Rules of Engagement. Divine Right of Kings. Finder's-Keeper's. To the victor go the spoils!" He raised his fist at the skyscraper. A light went out on the 56th floor. "Onward we push, doing whatever they say, fighting for survival, competing against ourselves. To the marketplace and blood will spill! This is not what emerges from the multiplicity of simple interactions between seven billion people. We are dogs thrown in a pit, to fight to the death. Onward we are driven, toward this, The Global Potemkin Village." He raised his arms and turned a full circle.
My shoulders sagged.
He looked at a couple walking down the sidewalk, hand in hand. "I remember something. I remember something." He closed his eyes. "When we used to sit around on the front porch and watch the sunset and say hello to the neighbors and talk about the relatives back East. Maybe someone would stroll by and join us and then another and I don't know why, but before you knew it our house had fourteen friends and six apple pies and card tables in every room. It went on until midnight or maybe nobody knows how long it went because who carried a watch except to work and it ended when everybody just stood up and said goodnight. Some unseen cue."
I was getting hungry.
"There was space between us back then. A regular space. No crowding. Big yards with a garden. Open land with the livestock and pastures out your back door."
I thought about all of the people that I no longer knew.
"And we worked together. When the community needed a well or a fence or a road, we talked about it and got together and worked at it and it was done."
I looked at my hands, pale, soft and bony. Typing hands.
"And we stuck together. When the river washed away the McGillicuty farm, we all put them up for six months until it was rebuilt. When the grocery store burned down, we all helped run the store from the back of the community building."
I thought, This is what it feels like to be irrelevant.
He cleared his throat. "I don't know why we did it. We just did. Something moved us. And when we did, it was beautiful. Like birds in flight, like a school of fish. Yeah. From us, emerged art." He bowed his head. "And when an explosion wiped out Mr. Marshall's grain silos we all..." He shuddered.
Now I was very afraid.

Civil War

2011-11-02T02:29:00.005-05:00

This is what is war.
I had read that politicians and their wives sat upon the hilltops overlooking the Occoquan River to watch the first battle of the Civil War, the Battle of Bull Run or Manassas. They imagined that they were going to have a picnic. This was about 150 years ago. The battle turned and they abandoned the hilltops and fled for their lives.
The fellow sitting at the counter next to me was staring into his coffee cup. He shook his head. "I saw glowing cats in the shelterbelt behind my house."
"What?" The smoke over the Occoquan valley vanished and I looked at his face, pale, loose and baggy like the skin on a rotting gourd. I smiled. "Maybe it was marsh gas, Will-O-The-Wisp. You know. Blue flames."
"No, they were cats. I see them every fall. They herd up at this time of the year, forming a defensive alignment - like Musk Oxen. The females are on the outer edge, facing outward, hissing, protecting their young."
"Where are the menfolk?" I wiped my mouth with the napkin, the one with a phone number I had intended to keep, but blue cats absorbed my thoughts and the napkin was taken away by the waitress.
He looked up, bewildered, his mouth open, exposing toast and eggs. There were no words.
I signaled the waitress, slid five dollars across the counter, excused myself, put on my hat, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. His eyes followed me out the door. I looked up and down the road. It was a small town: one grocery, one gasoline station, one bank, one florist, one funeral home and one beauty salon. I think it was a beauty salon - named Prairie Hair Design. Huh. I wondered if they did prescribed burns. Out walked a woman with blue hair. Is that - ?
A wildland fire usually has one point of origin: a lightning strike, a spark from a railroad car, a runaway campfire, an overheated muffler, a branch on a power line. From above, the boundaries of the fire have a teardrop shape, expanding outward from the point of origin, much like the outline of an island in a river or a patterned peatland. Forensics at the point of origin can determine the cause of the fire. So, working backwards to the point of origin it might be possible to determine the cause of all of the puffy hairdos with blue rinse in the community. Was it a stray lightning strike? Hot cinders tossed by a passing rail car? A gust of wind on the unattended campfire? A branch across two high voltage transmission lines? I figure that's why beauticians go to school for cosmetology; the occupational hazards are formidable and one needs rigorous safety training before setting up shop and releasing all of these chemically-altered fur bearers into the public arena.
But the line between cosmetology and cosmology is a fine one, as is the line between cosmology and astrology, and this transitivity supports my suspicion that the whole business of hair repair and maintenance is simply a superstitious act, like divining the future from the marks on one's hand or witching water with a willow twig or tossing a black cat over one's shoulder or walking beneath a cracked mirror. They strut out of the salon and onto this same sidewalk, puffy and proud, coming toward me with their glowing blue auras. Eager to meet the future. You will meet a dark and handsome stranger today! Luck awaits you around the corner! New experiences will happen to you and emotional connections await! And that lucky stranger just might be me. This mob, why, it looked like a herd of glowing cats. There they were. This set me in the opposite direction, toward the outskirts of town.
The town is surrounded by shortgrass hills, plain and featureless, like a beige wool sport-coat. A side slope overlooking the village has a pile of whitewashed rocks assembled in the form of a large letter "A", the first letter of the village name. It is visible for miles around and to the occasional light plane that might drift overhead, on its way to dust crops. The rocks were moved from the crest of the hill to the side slope a half-century ago by boys from the high school. It was an afternoon outing, a break from classroom studies, a community project. None of the boys noticed the that the rocks they were moving had been arranged in seven circles on the hill crest. Nobody noticed the flakes of black flint scattered around the rim of the hill. The teacher was busy staking out the edges of the letter. One boy found an arrowhead. He put it in his pocket; every kid had an arrowhead collection. Another boy pulled a coffee-colored leg bone out of the soft clay on the western edge of the hill. The teacher shouted and they both trotted back to the group. The letter was constructed and they marched down the hill and back to the school. They admired it from below. "You will be remembered for this as long as those rocks are there," said the teacher. Every year since, a group of students have marched back up that hill to repaint and readjust the rocks.
A century earlier, seven families would set up camp on this hilltop, using the rocks to hold down the skirts of their lodges. They had been doing this as long as they could remember and the keepers of oral history said that their ancestors had been doing it since the day they emerged from the Hole in the earth. The River was visible to the camp and they would venture down to the sandbars and riverbanks each day to trade and to visit. They thought it would last forever.
Well, the village came, bringing forever to an end. The valley where the village was built was in the opposite direction of the River, at the base of the hills. The seven families abandoned the hill.
On the way to that hill, I passed the fellow I talked to at the cafe. "I can't get the cats out of my head," he said, shaking his head like he had wasps in his ears.
"I am trying to forget." I kept on a fast pace, walking up-slope toward the crest of the hill. I could hear him swatting the air behind me and arguing with cats. I raced up the hill and reached the crest, spotted with yucca and sandstone blocks and granite glacial erratics. Standing behind the letter A, near the missing stone circles, I turned and looked down on the village. Cars and pedestrians worked the sidewalks and streets below.
I don't think it would be possible to get too far away from anything in a town like this. Here, the mortician is the beautician's husband, and nobody seems to know the difference, the banker is the brother of the chief of police who has a key to the vault, the Mayor owns the saloon where the pastor moonlights as the bartender so long as he doesn't tell the Mayor's wife anything about his visits, the church group meets in back of the grocery store and sings songs about sin with hearty vigor, and no wonder, they were celebrating the communion with the same brand of wine they drank at the saloon the night before and were singing the same songs they sang that night - with some alterations at the end of the final verse to express penance and sorrow for the backsliding ways expressed in the first verse - and the florist works nights as a nursing assistant at the hospital (her flower arrangements are slightly used), the gasoline station owner runs an insurance agency from his garage, the same garage where he keeps the fire truck, and the ambulance driver is the mortician, never known to speed. This place is everywhere. As the village grows into a city, the connections multiply and mutate and suddenly, it exceeds our natural limitations and simultaneously it exceeds our ability to understand it. A new class of merchants arise, those that ply statistical approximations and primitive, mathematical models to describe our new, self-replicating, autonomous reality, all of which fall desperately short. It is Dystopia, where industrial output of ignorance and error is growing nine-percent a year and everyone has a manufacturing job. In this environment, we don't even recognize our own children.
Thus, you bounce a check at the grocery store and you may end up getting a fatal manicure in a burning church.
At that moment, I recall that I think that I recalled that phone number. It was the number for the mortician. No, the beautician. Or was it the mortician. Ah, what's the difference? It's a thin line between a mortician and a beautician; the difference is the vigor of your client. I think. I know that one or both or neither of them wanted me for something or maybe not for something. That is for sure.
Man, I thought it would be a picnic, being up on that hill, but things turned out far, far worse than anyone could have expected. That I will remember for a long time.

Ghost in the Darkness

2011-09-19T23:16:00.006-05:00

There is a wind out on the meadow. It whistles through the bones of a bird, hollow like drinking straws, a pneumatic system, bellows pumping air that keeps the frame bloated and aloft. It sings. Then a gust carries the bird away. I look at my notepad. I had something to write down but I lost it.

It is a cloudy, low sky. Wind and water are fundamentally clear, but you add smoke or clay or condensation and they each become visible. It's like putting a radio collar on a suspect bear or radioactive dye in the bloodstream. The suspended substance gives it a form and you can track it across a matrix. But it's still not wind or water.
Sometimes it doesn't matter. The bear circles a sheep herd in the foothills at night and you can watch it move in and out of the herd carrying off one course of a meal after another, a feast, a banquet of mutton - all in the comfort of a climate controlled office in the northern Rocky Mountains. I think about that office and wonder what heat used to feel like.
I want to tie a rope to the bird. Before the taming of the electric current, a sheep herder would have to recognize the shape and space and color of the eyes in the firelight. Two red dots four inches apart. Two blue dots that don't move. Two green ones that move up and down. Quick. Which one is the sheep. Which one is the bear. Which is the reflection of the moon. Which one is the camp cook. A shot into the dark could mean hot bear steaks tonight or prison meals for life. It is at this point in time that the herder, his face raining sweat and eyes wide like egg whites, conceived the idea of radio telemetry and was about to broadcast it to his two friends staring into the woods, but, alas, was unable to expound due an unfortunate combination of poor night vision, wind, rain, and simple miscalculation. Three bears, not one. This is what we call circumstances beyond one's control. Too bad. Under the same circumstances the bears easily recognized the well-fed sheep herders.
The vast majority of humans were rural dwellers in centuries gone by; some 95% in the United States in the 1790's. They were villagers with stone or wood or animal skin dwellings and few dozen family units and surrounding fields with livestock and beyond it, a vast wilderness. This was an unknown wilderness, really, known no more than the accidental provisions that spilled out from it into the village: the occasional elk, the flock of grouse overhead, the swarm of bees, the creek that passed between the fields. Many villages were surrounded by barricades of pointed stakes or stone walls and armed men posted in watchtowers. This wilderness entered by invitation only. At night, when something moved in the darkness the men would fire guns, shoot arrows, toss spears, throw rocks...even their own children. At daybreak they would venture out into the bush and find blood-soaked sand and drag marks. A wounded or dead animal was carried away by something much, much larger. The talk would spread and convolute and quickly the animals would become unimaginably large. Great, horned beasts with claws and toothed jaws that ate entire mountains and breathed fire and ate women and children by the thousands.
Today, it's the other way around. The vast majority of humans are urban dwellers; some 75% in the United States live in cities. These are still walled cities, with stone fortresses and watchtowers with heavily armed men. But the wilderness is proportionately smaller: quaint, little fenced rectangles, like schoolyards, with a sharp, razor-tipped line between the civilized and wilderness lands that can be seen from 800 miles in space. And the forest that was never known is now simply unidentifiable: a scrubby, worm-eaten corpse with tilting trees, pock marked stumps, inbred wildlife, sunken aquifers, tailing piles, herds of feral cats, toxic stains, windblown plastic, severed corridors, and an understory of wiry invaders and genetically-modified mysteries that coil around the last remnants of the original forest.
There is a rustling in the woods tonight. Quickly, the menfolk grab their guns and fire into the darkness. Guns on turrets with fifty caliber shells and thousand-pound bombs with jellied gasoline and dioxin and benzene and plutonium. The smoke drifts back into the city and burns the eyes. An air-quality alert goes out. In the morning the men venture into the bush and find the remains of something unrecognizable; tufts of fir, or is it feathers. Maybe it's a mammal. Probably a bird. Who knows. Who knew. Who would ever know.
I suspect that the animal probably recognized us before it vanished. It's probably true: Something is here that is larger than we can imagine, something monstrous, a great, horned beast with claws and toothed jaws that eats entire mountains and breathes fire and eats men and women and children and living things by the thousands.

Foreshortening

2011-09-16T02:20:00.000-05:00

As a man walks away from you he becomes smaller than your outstretched hand. If you look around, there are a lot of things that were very big that have become small for one reason or another. Like Y2K. Atom-bomb shelters. Prohibition. Fur trade. Knee screws. So it is a little unsettling to think that I am shrinking in the distance myself, that is, according to people who see me getting smaller and had the notion to tell me before I disappeared altogether, sort of like the last, desperate protestation of love between a man and a woman at a train station in the few seconds before the conductor says "all aboard". The hands break apart and the fingers reach out to touch but the distance grows until the hand disappears and all that remains is the plume of coal smoke on the horizon.
You wait long enough and the memory disappears too.
It can feel like fatality, this departure, or maybe it's the other way around. The difference is the reason for the disappearance. When one disappears without warning, as might happen when abducted by anthropologists or duped at a card game into taking a monastic vow of silence or when becoming too absorbed in doing the math in one's head or when falling into severe and prolonged existentialism, it feels the same. I had a friend who disappeared that way once. I saw her reflection in a storefront window and I turned to look at her and a bus passed between us and she was gone. I think that is what happened. Her name escapes me. She had blonde, no red hair.

The other day, while in search of vanishing species on the north central grasslands, I came across a cemetery. It was a quaint prairie cemetery guarded by wrought iron fences on the south and a depression-era windbreak of Siberian elm and Black Hills spruce on the north, east. In the European custom, the graves all lay feet facing east, luxury suites with a fabulous view of the early morning sky to the east, so it is said. The oldest graves had fallen into disrepair, no flowers to be seen, the names and dates were weathered, and many were toppled. Someone had taken the time to recast the names on little iron plates staked in the grass, but that person did their work decades ago and, I suppose, they lay amongst the headstones somewhere, rubbing elbows with old friends. Today, their names escape us, faint etchings mottled with lichen and moss.

As I walked away, I turned to look and it got smaller and smaller until it disappeared from view. Now I can't even remember where the place was.

So ends another summer. Oak savannas, black ash swamps, sagebrush and badlands, lodgepole pine and Douglas fir. Ponderosa pine, thick red trunks and deep, almost black boughs. Sturdy grasses and sagebrush so tall that it imagines itself a tree, so long as it doesn't get near one, which isn't likely, seeing that most trees in North Dakota are in museums. And sandstone caprocks huddled over strata like a child over a cereal bowl; don't touch what's underneath. And we wouldn't for a long time.
Well, the long time came to an end. We exited the age of Enlightenment, enthralled with our own wisdom and might, and took the new found liberty and knowledge and created the Industrial Age, which continues to this day. Now some may say, No, it ended when we entered the Technological Age or the Information Age or the New Age or the Styrofoam Age or the Corn Syrup Age or Sectional Couch Age or whatever it is now, but half the globe has yet to see an industry in their backyard yet. Untapped resources and new markets, my boy. This has to change and change it will.
Sometimes we go to the store and the sign says, "New and Improved", and we put it in the washing machine and the clothes still come out with grass stains and ring-around-the-collar and the mothers look cross and the kids look downcast. All that was new and improved was the lettering on the box, those words New and Improved. So it is with the Industrial Age: We have taken the old machinery from the Dark Ages, the knee screw, the iron collar, the rack, the branks, the garotte, and put a label "New and Improved" and hawked it to nuclear families around the western world. Only this time, we wouldn't dare use them on the heretical masses; they learned to read and write. So we applied them to inanimate objects, ones that can't complain or riot or call lawyers or write great declarations of inanimate object rights. And we applied them to unintelligent brutes, from the great apes on down to lobsters.
As I leave, I can see the hills recede from view, hills brushed red with tussocks of little bluestem and moist valleys of ash and elm and wild plum, with flocks of sharptail grouse bursting from buffaloberry thickets and nighthawks sweeping the skies in the late evening and a luscious full moon, tomato-red from forest fires to the west. I am becoming a dot on the horizon, a distant memory, someday forgotten altogether, like the folks in the prairie cemetery. But today, the long time has come: The caprocks and soil mantle and grassland carpet are being pulled away by medieval machines, the modern-day Brodequin, Strappado, Judas Cradle, Heretic's Fork, and Iron Maiden. The riches are exposed and angry, desperate, confused, trembling crowds gather and plunder them. They light fires to burn what remains.
As I disappear, I look back and I see nothing. It occurs to me that we both disappear at the same time and someday, there will be nobody left to remember a thing.

The Circle of Death

2011-09-04T22:55:00.009-05:00

There is a loud train outside of my window. I suppose it is filled with hot, steaming coal from some strip mine in Wyoming, but it is too dark to tell right now. It blends into the night. The thing thunders by, the cabin shakes, and it blows its horn. Why blow the horn here? Maybe fifty years ago, when people lived in this town, working at the sawmill, but today, I think the only people left are buried behind a church. The ground behind the church shakes but nobody knows a thing.
As always, I am a moment away from joining in their silent vigil. In fact, sitting here, I am living in a space not much bigger than a coffin. And I don't know much more than they do. So the line between us grows thinner. At least my space has a window, although it is barely large enough to squeeze through. This is an advantage when the thing squeezing through is trying to get into the vehicle rather than out.

A fly fisherman three miles upstream bumped into a grizzly.

This is recreational vehicle life. I think I understand, as I see seventy year old men around me in white knee socks and baggy shorts and feed hats with military slogans and toy poodles and stories about the glories of war. I have no such stories, but being here, I make up stories about life on the open range. The blizzard of '49 that swallowed up our town and we had to dig a tunnel all the way to Texas to find daylight. Branding cattle in a pouring rainstorm with two broken arms, a case of typhoid, all the while fighting off eight wolves and seven rustlers. Mom was too busy tending the milk cows to give birth so the kids all borned themselves. Putting water in the Bank because it was the only valuable thing we had. Going without air for a summer because dad said so, besides, it was too thick to breathe it anyhow. Times were tough but we rode it out. Can't say that for peoples nowadays.

Anyhow, there are fires in the mountains tonight. Dry lightning they call it. Where the storm doesn't send rain, it sends lightning. It's virgo, where the rain evaporates before it reaches the ground. So the lightning hits an old dry log in the pine forest. Pine, just a form of hard gasoline, if you ask me. Then the log smoulders for a day or a week. And then one hot, dry day, the humidity drops as the temperature goes up and at 1:43 in the afternoon, the log bursts into flames. The trees above it catch some of the fire and carry it into the canopy and it races across the treetops like a long haired sunburned surfer. A child of the stylized Sun seen in children's picture books.

The smoke today looked like the wall cloud of a thunderstorm. But it wasn't blue or black, it was orange, brown, like dust; it could have been mistaken as dust by a homesteader. All day long the smell of rich roasted pine was in the air, sweet, like pipe tobacco, and at this intensity, as alluring as fresh coffee grounds. Maybe it is nicotene in the air. Maybe it is instinctive hunger, the sense that there is a porterhouse steak somewhere out there on the spit. The legend is that buffalo would follow the smoke in the air to find, after a few weeks of walking, fresh green grass where the fire had been.

The moon is red, filtered through the combustibles of a million Douglas fir and lodgepole pine and ponderosa pine. Too quickly they died, if they had only waited a few eons, they might have turned up in a coal mine.

The train sounds a bell as it crosses the highway. The horn fades in the distance, the horn descending in pitch as the sound waves stretch out. Like firewood, coal heats us twice: Once when it is burned for fuel, twice when it burns the planet.

Reach for the Stars

2011-07-08T23:49:00.009-05:00

They say if you were to save a penny the first day and double it every day after that, you would be a millionaire in no time. Flat out millionaire. Like pennies from heaven.
Today, I look up and the heavens are like a rope, clouds braided ahead of a storm, and rain is falling out there 20 miles away, you can see the gust front pushing it like bristles on a blue broom. There is a white streak in the rain; it's hail, penny sized hail rushing down like a mob of shoppers in December, outstretching each other to grab that limited-collector's-edition-styrene-based-children's-entertainment-device, wiping out some man's cornfield, stripping away the cobs, turning it to poor silage. Funny thing, the fellow prayed for rain a few days ago, that day he forgot to renew his crop insurance, and now this. Now he is penniless, scouring the fields for a few edible ears to feed his livestock. He looks at the porch, rustling with his untamed children. They chatter like racoons. He looks at a battered cob in his hand. Hey, what if? The insurance man shakes his head, calls it an Act of God and walks away, dusting off his hands. The children watch him walk until he disappears over a hill. The youngest begins to gnaw on the railing.
The farmer looks up at the sky and closes his eyes for a moment, letting the sun wash it one last time. Clouds quickly intervene and his face darkens.
"Maybe it's time to quit," says his wife. Her yellow hair stands straight on end, like husks from shucked corn.
"I never thought..." He picks up some dirt in his hand and tosses it into the wind. The wind blows it back in his face.
The insurance man walks along the damaged fields and notices that the division between the damaged crop and the undamaged crop is a clear line, maybe a foot wide. Centuries ago this was grist for rumor mills; the man sold his soul, the wife is a witch, the children are possessed. The insurance man thinks, "I could have made a killing back then." He laughs to himself.
They say that while walking in dangerous neighborhoods you should carry the bulk of your money in your shoes and a few dollars in your pockets, to give to robbers. So, after the fall harvest, the neighbors cut down the shelterbelts and planted larger fields. Hiding corn in their shoes, I guess. Years later, their children crossed numerous strains of corn and fielded larger plants. Then they sought out the robber to get all of this stuff out of their shoes because they couldn't walk. After a while the robbers started to grow too, and in a few decades they had gotten so big that nobody had enough corn to satisfy them. This brings us up to date.
Off in a laboratory the farmer's grandchildren are splicing the genes of corn with crocodiles or coelacanthes or axolotyls or scrappy dockworkers or hamburgers. Fine. There is a pounding on the roof and the technicians look up. Asbestos filters down from the ceiling. They shrug. Looming over the lab is the shadow of a 900-foot tall robber hungry for his next meal. Same one that crushed the church down the road.
So, what lies ahead? It's this: First we planted simple native corn. Then it was hybrids, the Green Revolution. Then it was gene splicing, the Gene Revolution. Exponential growth in yields. Still not enough. Life is not fooled by life; it always recognizes its own kind. Like the grizzly that can smell the chocolate bar inside the wrapper inside the sealed container inside the ice chest locked inside the car with the windows rolled up, we just can't outsmart this biosphere. It knows what we are doing and tells us to reach for the sky and empties our pockets and strips us clean, even taking our shoes.
I mean, are you sure that those are your shoes?
Enough of this. If the biosphere cannot be fooled by its own kind, then the only alternative to introduce a truly alien life form to the human menu. A synthetic crop, inorganically engineered. Hail problems? Engineer a hail-resistant crop, with hardened cellulose and lignin, something developed under controlled laboratory conditions, something with atoms of sulfur or chlorine bound to the native molecules, hardening it like body armor. Field test it in the Midwest. Fire buckshot at it. Run the tractor over it. Thrash it with a bullwhip. Then set it loose. It can rain, it can hail, let it hail, go ahead, come down hard, the Weather Militia, like cluster bombs, cheap nail bombs with gasoline, let nature throw everything in its arsenal and watch as the clouds clear and the rain passes to the east and there, the cornstalks stand tall, glistening and glowing in the sun. A triple rainbow forms a backdrop.
I can see the advertisements now: After supper, a farmer steps outside to admire his fields. The sun has set long ago. The porch lights are off, the house is dark. But the field is lit up - the corn is still glowing. A smile forms on his face, and his skin cracks along his chin; he will be shedding soon. "Yes," he thinks, "Crops. Provide food for my livestock and light for my neighborhood." Then cut away to the Corporate Logo being held in the hand of a furry, three-toed child. Voice over: "A better world. Imagine that."
Sure, double your pennies every day. Exponential growth. Pennies from heaven. Problem is, we would end up eating all the copper for food because we used up everything else making pennies.

Next In Line

2011-04-02T00:31:00.012-05:00

The setting sun reflects off of the altostratus clouds undulating overhead, clouds like dust behind herds of plains mammals, antelope, bison, bighorn sheep, and elk racing across the prairie and toward the sun, where they burst into flames, fueling it for another sixteen weeks. Sixteen weeks. At one time there were tens of millions of these in North America, vast communities stretching to the horizon. September 18th, 1804 at the confluence of Crow Creek and the Missouri River: "Herds of antelope and buffalo; the last of which were in such multitudes that we cannot exaggerate in saying that at a single glance we saw 3000 of them before us." That was one hour's worth of light. But pressure from the east pushed them to the west, into the setting sun, where they ignited like pine cones tossed in a campfire. They say, without them we would have been in darkness all these years.
We rub our hands over the dwindling fire. Beyond the light, a branch cracks and we squint. We think we see a dark shape moving in the woods, coming our way. Then we laugh; it's our own shadow, a black giant towering in the trees, blocking the light, shifting fitfully in the fluttering fire. What were we thinking?

There are only so many animals to burn. The sun flickers and darkness comes anyhow. Now the neighbors pull their curtains back and for the first time in years I can see their faces, looking out of their windows for a reason. Reason doesn't make sense this time. Someone is to blame for the dark, and they peer into it, squinting to catch the form of a witch, someone who has sold his soul, who changes form, into a bat, a talking wolf, a raven.
The museums are full of wolves, bats, and ravens, the fortunate ones not driven off of far western cliffs to tumble into some abyss, maybe the ocean, stained red with blood and the light of an angry sun. But who is counting mistakes? We count promises.
Someone stands up on the corner with a torch and starts promising. "Some among us say the moon has passed between the earth and the sun." He waves the torch. "Heresy! The sun goes behind the moon? This is an omen, I tell you. They have brought the darkness themselves, to terrify us and to take our homes and land." The crowd roars, a mob forms and marches down the streets and alleys, breaking into houses and pulling people out of bed and dragging them into the town square. "Animals!" A bonfire is lit. Angry men and women warm their hands over the fire. Within a decade the forest is stripped bare in an effort to keep the bonfire burning.
Today, the town is empty, except for a few bats, wolves, and ravens.

In some other town on some other day someone stands up again and makes promises. "Studies in market economics have revealed that environmental crises are a ruse set by weaker populations to exploit healthy populations. These crises are not random events." It's Xious Lamming, Economics Chair at Lunking University in Hong Kong. "These are discreet ploys by populaces in substandard living conditions designed to strip advantaged communities of their wealth and health. It's like the deep sea anglerfish that distracts passing fish with the bright flamboyant filament protruding from his massive head. A curious fish bites the filament and is instantly engulfed by the cavernous expandable jaws of the anglerfish. Some are able to swallow fish twice their size. This is nature, and the development of this strategy has found a convergent development in the impression of an ecological crisis."

Economists like Lamming, from the Acne School of Economics, insist that the disadvantaged present an illusion of disadvantage, which masks their real condition. "Just in terms of biomass, they exceed that of the wealthy by a factor of one thousand - and the disparity grows by the hour. Yet few seem to notice how large they are. The illusion is that you only see a tiny fraction of the unit at any given time."
Lamming is speaking at a black-tie affair. Citing reports about shortfalls in production, declining resources and increasing demand, he explains, "Spending what does not yet exist is required to create capital in order to have enough to spend which is required in order for capital to exist." He points to a graph with lines heading upward. "See, there is no crisis." Then turning to the recent meltdown of four government printing presses that had overwhelmed their cooling systems, he remarks, "What we need are four steam turbines and we can turn that money-making into clean renewable energy to light our homes and factories!" The crowd cheers.
Lamming continues. "They say that consumption is outstripping production, that production is outstripping resources and that resources are dwindling." He waves his hand at the audience. "Show me the evidence. This is a lie! The opposite is true. Don't buy it. Market forces, allowed to run free and unhindered, maintain a steady state between production and consumption and drive innovation and introduce alternatives. Prosperity is maintained indefinitely. Given enough time, it disperses throughout the economy. This is a natural law." He points to the crowd. "And do you want freedom or tyranny?"
The audience shouts, "Freedom!"
"The freedom to compete, to carve out a niche, to secure your livelihood, and to prosper. Is there anything wrong with that?"
The audience cheers again.
"All we ask is for the freedom to compete and to live our dreams, to have everything we desire."
The audience is chanting, "Freedom, Freedom!"
"Then what do we do with those who want to take away our precious economic freedoms, fought for with blood, sweat and tears? What do we do with those who would undermine consumer confidence, who would hoard our resources, impair initiative and innovation, who infiltrate our society and spread rumors, lies, innuendos and fear, whose only aim is to swallow us whole and strip us of our wealth and health, our homes and land?"
The audience roars.
"This is war! Let's hunt the animals down!"

Roadblock

2011-03-05T00:39:00.003-06:00

"There goes another wave of hippies." Raul pointed at an old school bus rattling down the highway. "Look at the colors!"
I swung around in the front seat and watched the bus climb the hill behind us. Blue smoke poured from its belly and soon, the bus was invisible.
Raul reminisced. "I remember when they poured out of America in the 1970's at such a rate that you could feel the social consciousness draining away."
"Did you lose track of them?"
"I don't remember, maybe I did." He rubbed his chin with his right hand. "But there is no way I could tell anymore." He was gazing at a range of mountains to the east. Along its eastern slope a bank of white clouds massed beneath the summit, struggling. Then like a climber, it made an assault, rolling up the talus, reaching a hand onto the peak, pulling itself up, rising and swelling and raising itself in victory. Then, giddy with excitement, it raced down the western slope, tossing its gear into the air. In an instant, it was gone, evaporating into the clear blue sky. I wondered if it made a sound like thunder or someone clapping his hands - the sound of one hand clapping. Small men tending sheep in the bright sun on the western slope glanced up and saw absolutely nothing. Raul wasn't watching the road and the van swayed back and forth across the center line. "They say that the people left behind drifted into a malaise."
"Where are we now?"
"I don't know if I care." Raul was still staring at the mountains.
"I mean, here."
"Yeah. Here. Now. Where I am now." He shook his head. "Sometimes it just hurts to be awake. Sometimes it just doesn't feel like anything." He stared at the yellow center line, blinking on and off. "Either way, where is the off switch for memory?" He downshifted as we descended a steep hill. "When daybreak is like a prison guard rattling his steel baton on the bars of your six by six cell."
I looked out the window and imagined I was somewhere else. A vendor was selling watermelons and papayas along the highway. It was noon and he was slumped in a wooden chair, sleeping. His mouth was open wide and so dark, so large I could not see his face. I looked over and Raul was leaning forward, like he was trying to push the van further ahead.
"I remember when we had to learn everything by rote; how to tie my shoes, the alphabet, multiplication tables, I before E except after C, my phone number, Avogadro's number, emergency phone numbers, and the secret places where we could hide when dad came home drunk. Now memory is sold and traded like hog bellies, grain futures, pounds of butter." He looked over at me. "How far can you put yourself from what you have experienced? It is always a synapse away. You could be on the other side of the earth and in a blink, you are in 1963 and every adult you know is terrified, or 1969 watching your best friend being lowered into the ground, or 1976 watching your parents walk away from each other for ever after. We are everywhere at once."

I looked at the map. "Where? You aren't driving fast enough."
"I tried that once and I still couldn't get away."

"I mean, we have to get to San Jose."
"Right. But we will still be right here."
"The van?"
"Forget it." He leaned forward again.
I closed my eyes and I saw a face beneath the water. I opened my eyes. "Forget what?"
"Look. You manage and store memory in the same space and time. Microprocessors could only dream of that, the slobbering, lumbering louts, moving memory back and forth across the chipset between process and storage like a painter who leaves the paint bucket in the back of the truck and wonders why he accomplishes less each day. The paint dries before he gets to the ladder. If you look closely, he has no opposable thumbs."
I looked at my hands. The thumbs looked fine. For a second, I wondered if I could hold a gun in my hand but I knew I could. "What happens next?" I felt light headed.
He pushed the accelerator. "So instead of moving the paint closer to the process, we just bring in more trucks with stone-age painters and park them three hundred yards from the house. Now we have painters arguing over parking space, jamming up at the bottom of ladders, and meanwhile, the house is starting to cave in."
I looked in the back of the van. "Where?"
"They call it a 'crash.'" He was leaning so far forward his face nearly touched the windshield.
"Well keep your eyes on the road!"
"We can go faster than this."
"No."
"Yes." He looked over at me and for a moment I had an urge to say something and I started to speak but it disappeared. He looked back at the highway. "It is this: Microprocessors have limits to growth and speed. But along comes someone who dreams up the idea that they will build a house that has paint in the walls. Comes out at night or when it rains. Paint where it is painted. Product in the process. That is us. We are organic exascale processors. Product in the process, memory in the reasoning." He leaned back into the seat. He slowed down the van.
"Where are you going?"
"Not the way I wish." His head tilted down. "If I could just separate my memory from what I do with it, like those painters, maybe it would buy me some time, some time to relax, to contemplate what it is I am about to recall, sort of a buffer, a chance for other thoughts to rush in and jam it up, to slow down the whole idea, to cool it off, and I could relax for a little while." He closed his eyes. Up ahead were four policemen in the road. One held his hand up.

"Hey, look - looks like a checkpoint."
"I know." Raul downshifted.
Suddenly, my head hurt. "Keep driving, driving. I think I forgot something. I know I forgot something."

Meet The Enemy

2011-01-25T00:10:00.005-06:00

"On December twenty-fifth, 1914, they stood at the middle of the battlefield, in No Man's Land, shook hands and exchanged gifts. Think of it: Both sides of the Great War met and shook hands."
I wasn't paying much attention to Griswald, I was preoccupied with the word out of Chicago - the streets on the northside were blocked by burning cars. Baseball fans were on a rampage. I looked up. "So they did what?"
"Both sides shook hands."
"OK. But did they stop fighting?"
"Nah, the holiday ended, the clergy switched from carols to a war cry. The soldiers jumped right back into the trenches and lobbed artillery shells at each other." Griswald nodded his head. "You know, I don't think we are sure if each side went back to the right trench. It doesn't say."
No, it doesn't. I wondered if France might be in Germany or the other way around. I looked in his direction and could see the skyline reflected upside-down in the Chicago River. Half the population was undoing what the other half was doing. I turned my head sideways to see. "Maybe that was part of the strategy. The sum of battles equals the war."
"And if you win the battle but lose the war? The sum is zero. Not only that: They would have to switch political sides. Then they have defeated themselves."
I had to think about that. My eyes drifted to the sports section. Cub fans were outraged after another off-season ended in bitter disappointment. Pictures showed black smoke rising from overturned cars. I looked up again. "And the other side too."
“Enemy combatants dress up as their enemies, to fool the enemy. What if everyone dressed up and acted like their enemies?" Griswald was staring at me.
I looked away. My eyes strayed to the sports page. One fan, I think he was from Vimy Ridge - I think it's on the northwest side - he lamented, "We had high hopes for this winter." A picture showed him stomping on a burning t-shirt emblazoned with the team logo. He was wearing fatigues. "We expected so much more. We thought this would be the year. The year to end all years."
"Well?"
"Oh." I looked back up and he was still staring at me. "Then we are our own enemy." It was becoming apparent that I wasn’t going to win this argument. I turned and I could see a smoky haze drifting out across the lake, coming from the north. Up there somewhere, there had been a team poised on the brink of greatness, certain to add strength, speed, and savvy to the roster from a bounty of all-star free agents, a deep college draft and dozens of electrifying high school prospects. Not to mention cash reserves that would make a banker blush. My hands started to shake.
"Then why don't we hire the enemy not to fight for us?" He saw me rolling up the newspaper and leaning forward on the bench. Rocking back and forth was comforting. I began to hum.
"I don't know."
“The perfect economy.”
I looked down. I couldn’t win. Another off-season had failed to live up to that promise, slipping through executive fingers like a greased pig, leaving the team in its familiar role of spoiler. "At least we can still disrupt the negotiating process so everybody loses," stated one front-office executive. "Nobody can beat us at that – we lose but we win."
Griswald started talking again but his words didn’t have the same impact; I was losing my interest. He was waving his arms and pointing and talking but I heard only an occasional word, scattered like broken glass: "The commodity of loss...macroeconomics of war...the ultimate consumer…the marginal utility…” A breeze came up and I watched the winds shatter the waters, breaking the skyline into a thousand pieces.
I unrolled the paper. This made sense: The Cubs were entering a second century of failed winter negotiations and deal-making. Trading deadlines had passed, free agents signed with other teams, draft prospects switched sports. An off-season with so much promise, so much expectation. Once again, fans wandered the streets in stunned disbelief.
Griswald continued, "Satisfaction of war is..."
I was thinking but my mind was blank. Then I remembered. One morning, a fan made this statement into a news camera: “It's simple. To continue to produce loss, there must be a demand. The reality is, everything is zero in the end. Loss is universal. As fans we need to expect nothing more, we must lower our demands or we will wallow in disillusion and utterly defeat ourselves." Like a rumor whispered in an agitated mob, these words were repeated thousands of times across the airwaves and front page. Within hours, fans, players, management, and press broke into chaos. Players openly questioned their teammate’s work ethic. Fans challenged each other's loyalty. The manager undercut his coaching staff before front-office personnel. Union representatives were shut out of player’s meetings. Management leaked details about injuries suffered by players with expiring contracts. The press reported what players were saying about other players behind their backs and that it was obvious to thinking people everywhere that the teammates could no longer trust the other teammates to tell the truth. Management canceled the annual January convention for “security reasons”. And the fans started overturning cars.
By nightfall, management appeared on television screens appealing for calm. They released a statement to the press: "We urge all fans to remain loyal to the team. If this continues, we all lose." But people continued to stream into the streets, streets filled with riot police and teargas. Fans stormed the front office and took hostages, demanding a change in leadership. Players swapped uniforms with security. Reporters broke into locker rooms and carted away sporting equipment.
Griswald was adamant: "A diminishing utility..."
The six-o’clock news showed another fan lamenting, "I don't even know who the infield is." He pointed at his shirt. “I have two dozen sweatshirts with names that are no longer with the team. What good are they? Who am I supposed to cheer for?"
And now, cars burning on the north side. I looked out at the cityscape. From where I sat, I could see the steel, concrete and aluminum girders named after the dead - the sarcophagus of the rich. And the illuminated letters and logos of inanimate corporations in the skyline, like lighthouses guiding the wayward pedestrians into onto rocky shoals littered with the bones of workers from the space age which lay upon bones of workers from the industrial age which lay upon bones from the textile age which lay upon bones from the iron age. A bus growling past, leaving a swirl of Styrofoam cups and cigarettes and black dust and pigeons in its wake, and nervous automobile horns, armies of voiceless employees staring into the gray distance, doors opening and closing, elevators and doormen and steaming manhole covers and lines of cars at every intersection, idling, filled with idle people listening to shopping music and broadcasts of angry middle-aged men arguing about sports. Yes, sports. This could be anywhere.
Griswald continued, "Which reaches a saturation point..."
Behind me, in a sports tavern, a television blinked. A very small sportscaster was interviewing a very large player. "What if you lose, will you sign with another team?" The player shrugged, "It’s all about winning, putting one up in the win column, about hard work and the fans and giving one hundred and ten percent." The reporter replied, "But you haven’t gotten an extra-base hit in three months." "My record speaks for itself." The reporter pressed, "But you have four years left on your contract and your numbers are declining." The player shrugged again, "Not the numbers that matter." The reporter again, "Twenty-thousand dollars a game. Do you know what I could do with that sort of money?" The player looked down at the reporter, "Play baseball." He stuck the microphone closer to the player’s face. "Other players say you don’t have the same drive you used to." The player had headphones on, the same shopping music in his ears. "I read your columns; neither do you." The reporter pushed forward, "Well if I were you, I would show more respect for this great institution and honor my contract -" The player stiffened, the reporter backed away. "- But you're not."
I looked over to my left and Griswald was still talking. "And continued consumption..."
Another screen played a video of a World Series game from some thirty years ago. A player was standing by the pitcher's mound, with a mob of reporters around him. He was holding his son in his arms. He was in tears. "What are you thinking about now, Sam?", asked one reporter. The athlete choked on his words. "I am thinking about the other teams. I am thinking about those other teams that lost, about their anguish and loneliness. The experience of defeat is a severe one, unimaginably so. Do you understand this? You spend your entire lifetime working for this moment, your chance to be on the world stage, to execute all of your skills which you developed through so much effort and training and coaching. You imagine this moment and you fully expect yourself to be the one who wins it all. And then the big day comes and goes and you find that some other person who has spent the same amount of energy and has the same amount of innate ability and quality of coaching has not outplayed you but is the beneficiary of the most insignificant and arbitrary of events...a passed ball, a balk, fan interference, the glint of sunlight, umpire error, a spitball, a blown kiss from the stands, bad water in the drinking fountain, an argument with the catcher, and it tips the delicate balance and you lose the game. The taste is bitter, the anguish wells, the hunger subsides, and ultimately, you feel an overwhelming sickness. The arms are heavy and numb, the legs rubbery, the body shakes. You bloat up, you can’t keep down water. You have lost, not only the championship game, you have lost your appetite for the game itself." He wiped a tear away from his eyes. "Their loss is our loss."
Griswald was still at it: "At which point we reach disutility..."
I looked at the newspapers tumbling down the streets. I remembered that Sam was a utility infielder, and, before that night had ended, he signed on with another team for a scandalous sum of money. His team went on to defeat his former team in the following World Series. I remember wondering why he seemed so pale and blinked so much during that interview. Now I know. I looked back up at the television. Now it was a live program and they were interviewing the same player. But today he was in a wheelchair, hunched and puffy, with slanted, knobbed hands, jaundiced and liver spotted, spindly legs with crooked toes with long yellow nails, and breathing oxygen through a tube. A nurse rolled his wheelchair up to the camera and he watched a television in the lobby of the nursing home. Fans broke windows and danced in water spraying from fire hydrants. He stared at the burning cars. "Why is it always this way? Every year the same thing." He pointed a gnarled hand at police with nightsticks chasing a crowd of youths. "And even if the team beats its opponents, it is never enough. It's like whiskey. First the Division, then the Pennant, then World Series. Then another World Series. Then another. Eventually we want to take on Japan, and then the Soviets, then the League of Nations, then the Intergalactic Federation, then other life forms. We can never feel big enough. Where does it all end? It's always this way." He looked at the Scottish wool blanket on his lap. "You know, to contemplate that generations from now nobody will remember a single thing about this team moves me to question the amount of energy infused into the moribund ballclub and its insolent fans."
He paused to cough, a paroxysm of sustained, phlegmatic wheeze that stretched his mouth wide like a perch that swallowed the hook. Slowly he gathered the breath to continue. "So what if we win? Then what? It's like having a baby dropped on your doorstep. It will need and you will feed and you will not be able to escape from it; it will cling and grow and grow and grow and it will hound you at your heels and claw at your back for the rest of your life. Your life, once so full of promise, now a reptilian struggle for survival."
His chest pulled upward, reaching for air. The fires on the television reflected in his glasses. His hand instinctively picked lint from the blanket then probed his shirt pocket for a cigarette. “No, no, Sam,” said the nurse, “you can’t smoke anymore. It will kill you.”
He looked up at the streetlights. "They don’t know what they hope for. The night of victory will be as dark as all the millions of nights that have occurred since the dawn of the universe, yet many will hail the spectacle beneath artificial lighting as the second coming of Ernie Banks and the balm for world recession and human malaise. But the lights will illuminate ever so briefly, like a lantern during a nor'easter, and it will crash to the floor, and the klieg lights and flash bulbs will be spent, and the darkness will envelop the wandering crowds until they fall silent, like the millions of sports fans that have fallen before them. The fields around the Coliseum are filled with the bones of men and women whose unwavering attention to the gladiators prevented them from noting the hail of burning arrows that descended from the hills surrounding the stadium." He paused to lift his left arm onto the armrest. It slipped and fell to his side, swinging slowly. "Did the Visigoths win the World Series? Modern sports stadiums crumble under controlled implosions to be replaced by greater structural illusions. The ultimate illusion isn't the stadium, it is victory: In the end, we all follow the heroes to the nursing home, crippled by shattered knees, ruptured lungs, fingers that bend and break like cane fishing poles, and a dehydrated mind with frayed circuitry that fires promise after promise after promise, pledging to be better tomorrow, better yesterday, better but I-don't-know-what-day-it-is. Help me, nurse.”
She put her hand on his shoulder. He paused to catch his breath. He pulled his chin up into the air and spoke. “But the memory is fibrous and riddled with gaping holes, as if tunneled by ants and attacked by woodpeckers and it doesn't recall anything, much less a promise to be better tomorrow, next week, next year. The next year came decades ago and it was actually worse than the year before." He closed his eyes and held his forehead with one hand. "I don't feel so good. I really don’t feel so good." He rubbed his forehead. "Silence, memory. Failure to retrieve is permission to believe...and...I want to believe again."
And there, to my left, was Griswald, still staring at me, laboring on: "Until there is nothing more. Until we have reached zero; a state of illness, a terminal illness of mind and body, where we experience permanent loss and dissatisfaction...a condition that leaves us as mute and lifeless and stained as those bronze statues of valiant warriors that stand guard around our Coliseums."

You Read It Here

2011-01-11T21:52:00.004-06:00

I watch the setting sun drop into the Pacific ocean and the sky burns red and the ocean begins to boil, sending off plumes of steam that will bring hot rains tomorrow. It is a straight line across the horizon, but I know it's not flat, it is bowed by the moon into tides and it slopes gently toward the edge of the earth where whiskey barrels full of men tumble over the falls and drop into outer space. They say that the space junk is from satellites, but we know better; it is just millions of whiskey barrels accumulating over time. Once in a while they fall out of orbit and burn up as they enter the atmosphere. The Leonid Meteor Shower is just the debris from the Age of Discovery. I am sure, up there somewhere is James Cook, Vasco da Gama, Barentz, Torrez, Elcano, Urdaneta, Balboa, Cabot, Drake, Hudson, Magellan, and even Columbus - plus their ships and briny crews. Swaggering, swashbuckling men swinging swords, strapped into barrels of salt pork, losing altitude, losing confidence. They say you can count hundreds of them in the night sky in mid-November. From here, one can trace a direct line to a very modern idea: Recycling. Somewhere I read that the earth spirals downward and catches the falling waters and it appears in the heavens as a thing we call rain. Sort of like a cistern that catches the rain that runs off of the roof of a house on the Great Plains. This is recycling. But the rains stopped coming, and the cistern never did fill up and the people fled for their lives and I read somewhere else that it was because they were being punished for the intemperance, sloth, and vanity of their ancestors. Now they recycle guilt from one afterlife to another. This is in the same paper that talks about the flat earth.
So, I turn the page and it says that a large raft of aged surfers is swirling in the south Pacific and threatens to alter the delicate ocean chemistry. They float away from shores along the Pacific rim, like coconuts. I quote one researcher from Wayfare University: "The surfers cover an area as large as the state of Kansas." And we all know that Kansas is nowhere near the ocean. Wait a second, I think I see a whiskey barrel falling in the western sky. A streak, copper colored, and it splashes into the sea like an Apollo module. A plume of steam goes up. Then nothing.

Now, persistence is the main concern. The researcher, Lemkus Boulough, stated, "We see that the inorganic and organic solids in the raft are resistant to biodegradation and ultraviolet light, and the corrosive effects of saltwater are rebuffed by the lipid sheen found on the outer laminates of most of the debris." He held up a large block of yellowish wax. "This is what we find forming in the oil sheen around the debris field. We think it has a half life of ten-thousand years." He lit a match under the wax. "But does it burn!" The paper said that the news conference was called off in order to allow firefighters to gain access to the building.
And byproducts are another concern. From his hospital bed, Boulough stated, "Once decomposition occurs, we see that the byproducts are highly toxic. We find bisphenol A, styrenes, and PS oligomer in alarming concentrations. And we are finding that there is secondary kill of scavengers and predators that cruise the deep ocean waters. Poisons are not discriminating."
So the giant raft of surfers slowly spins in the Pacific while pale, white predators and scavengers bob on the surface between bits of polystyrene, polyester, and epoxy surfboards and the expanding oily sheen on the ocean surface. This can be seen from high above, a kaleidoscope of colors, spreading into estuaries, mangrove swamps, tributaries, deltas, and over low lying coral atolls, coating birds and sawgrass and alligators and spawning fish. Everything is flammable now. Recent photos show that the sheen can even be seen from the barrelosphere some seventeen miles above the earth's surface where men losing altitude and confidence face the grim reality that all of their exploration has rewarded them with one thing: They will descend in a ball of fire.
But the marvels of ecology are at work. We stand in awe of human nature. Errors recycle between generations, are preserved, and are given protective status. No, we won't deplete our supply of barrels any time soon: recycling is at work and the downward spiral of the earth regenerates the atmosphere with barrels each summer, so the earth's expanding rainbow-colored chemical sheen and annual spectacle of failed expeditions can be enjoyed by all for many, many years to come.

Chain Letter Biology

2010-12-19T23:23:00.006-06:00

An old rancher looks at me and asks, "You ever seen a dust storm?" I open my mouth to say yes, but before I can answer, he says, "You've never seen a dust storm."
I look into the distance. Today I can see dust devils on the horizon, three of them, cutting through a bleached cornfield. The cornstalks raise their leaves in panic, but it is too late. The stalks are twisted and torn from the ground and pulled apart, leaf from trembling leaf. Bits of leaves and stalk flutter down from the sky like snow - dry, square flakes of corn snow. I hold a dozen of them in my hand. No two flakes are different from the other. This is the best we can do.
Mars is covered with dust devils. From above, you can see their circular tracks on the iron oxide and basalt, much like those left by tornadoes as they twist across asphalt. But there is no Martian travel guide. So the amateur astronomer peers into his narrow, cloudy lens and jumps! He sees the twisting tracks, scoured into the bare rock. He squints and starts counting the tracks. He spends days counting and cataloging. Then one day he sees something coiling across the rocks. From 100 million miles away, he studies it. From directly overhead. It's an organic, evolving shape, moving, gyrating, growing, cutting a track in the rocks and sand. Tracks like a sidewinder, a kangaroo rat, great blue heron. Therefore it is alive and animal. Is that a tail? A hypothesis is born: Sepia colored, one-eyed, leathery desert giants, with rippled, olive-green arms, twirling across the surface like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, swishing their ribbed tails behind them, leaving sparking, spiraling tracks in their wake. Perhaps they make a call like lemurs or dolphins. He rushes out the door. He spreads the word to his friends. His friends spread the word to their friends. Their friends spread the word to their friends. Thus, if each person tells two of his friends today, and each of those friends tells two of their friends tomorrow, within several days the amateur astronomer with the tiny telescope will himself be contacted by eleven million, seven hundred and thirty-eight thousand, two hundred and two breathless people, gasping to tell him the news that not only are there herds of highly developed, one-eyed aliens on Mars but that they have invaded earth and have taken over the railroads and control the media and are driving that ice-cream truck that is idling in front of his house. Armed with independent reports, he is ready to sit down and write his thesis. Now the shadows on the rocks in his telescope look like a top hat and a sparkly sequined gown. He hears them talking to each other.
No, singing. His thesis is published and the audience of millions embraces what they already knew millions knew to be true. Letters pour through the mail slot in his door like coins from a slot machine.
But somewhere out in the wilderness, a village was overlooked and never got the news. Too bad for them. It could be in the desert southwest, somewhere down a slick-rock canyon beneath a sandstone overhang. An Anasazi village. Stone houses tossing empty windows into the dry wash. Scattered amongst shards of clay pots with jittery lines and charcoal cubes are tiny corncobs as big as your thumb, multicolored with stripes and solids, with blue and red and black and purple and orange - like a Scottish scarf, Indian beadwork, an African kanga, a Laotian sihn. Footprints are in the sand from a woman who had just looked at the lines on the corn. Now she draws lines on the wet clay. She is making more pottery. Too bad for her. Drought is sweeping over the stone ridge above her and will suck the creek dry, take the life right out of her. Winds swirl the corn cobs around the dry creek bed leaving circles in the sand. She drops everything and runs, but it is too late.
Today, the winds continue. The fact is, on a barren, stripped landscape, the whirlwinds run amok. The heat is absorbed by the dark basalt and granite and asphalt or depleted inorganic soil, then it rises, fueling a global army of dust devils. They march across the surface exploding and burning everything in their path, exposing more basalt and granite. This does not have to be observed with a telescope. This day, as they pull the plants out by the roots and vaporize the soil, I hear a hissing sound and at several points across the landscape it appears as if the whirlwinds have peeled away the earth's mantle. Air escapes from the earth's core, sucked into the sky along with carpets of spring ephemerals, moss agates, desert varnish, coral reefs, cloud forests, and cobs of corn, no two of them alike. I drop everything and run. I would pass it along, but millions already know that millions know that this is not true. Too bad for them.

Failed Vision

2010-12-01T23:08:00.013-06:00

The vision fades with age.

Shielding my eyes from the cloudless skies in the Great Plains in July has not been enough. The ultraviolet rays have slipped around my palm and through my fingers and smeared the lens and numbed the retina. I thought the bones and badlands had bleached over the years, that repeated washings in sunlight took the color away. I thought that the contrails and flue gasses and auto emissions and turpenes were stacking in the dormant air mass. They were mounds of clouds, like bales of cotton. Industrial slaves in the dead of summer, hoisting bales in the open baked land. Not the faintest breeze. I thought I saw a man throw a horse out of his car. Horses were strewn across the landscape, floating in the shimmering heat waves, bobbing like boats. As the years went by, the waves reached my feet and lapped over my shoes. The salt spray left a crust on my clothes. I thought that the heat waves were like tides, advancing toward me as the new moon moved to the zenith, unseen in front of the sun, drawing the oceans upward. Somewhere out there, someone is pointing a finger, as if to say, where were you? If I didn't shield my eyes, I would probably bleach out like those bones that I think that I saw.
I think, this treeless basin is an interrogation room. Just then, I feel someone slam a book on my fingers. My knees shake. I yammer like twelve Olive-throated parrots in a cage. I describe what I saw, but they have me trapped in my words. I stumble from my seat and grope for the doorknob. Do I deny everything? Someone grabs my wrist and I feel a blow to the back of my head. Now everything goes white. Someone is shaking his head. Isn't there an alibi? My recollections are based on observations, careful observations. Through perceptive distortions and cognitive impairments. This is the world that I think that I thought that I knew. I slump back in the chair. I can't recall a thing.

So it is. The ultraviolet radiation pours down like rain, through a porous sky, poked full of holes by industrial stacks and aviation and overinflated ideas and a thousand hands reaching for the stars. There's gold in them thar stars. If I was a welder, I would wear a mask to protect my sight. But a million welders wearing a million masks marching across the landscape yammering like twelve million parrots is terrifying. What can I see that nobody else can't?

This is what they say, the idea: They say that this is the ascent, the condition under which life will accelerate. Advanced habitat and response. Already, the wisdom teeth fail to form, the vestigial tail is absorbed, the third eyelid recedes, the appendix shrinks, and the pinky toe shrivels away. Our fear of height and water has driven us from treetops and underwater life. We have migrated toward an engineered diet of spongiform petroleum products. Advances in food and water delivery systems has enabled us to abandon bipedalism in favor of a sitting position. Air is filtered, light is designed, sound is composed. Pseudogenes multiply, and we cast off our appendages, free at last, free at last.
Then comes the ultraviolet light, pouring down. Go ahead, punch another hole in the sky. And I think, this treeless basin has become a genetics laboratory, a mutation breeder reactor. Just then, my hands begin to swell, then my knees. I start stammering. I can't formulate any words, I can't describe what I am seeing, my thoughts are trapped in my head and I can't get out of my chair. Words and ideas are deleted, duplicated, inverted, inserted and translocated. And then, there is a sharp pain in my head and all I see is white. I can't remember a thing.
This is enlightenment? The body has a fifty-year warranty; there are gene regulators, DNA repair mechanisms, but what about our ideas? Uninsulated and prone, they mutate. They spill out, stillborn, damaged, enraged, deranged, flailing, with six arms, reptilian, with vestigial tails nine feet long - with spikes - and scaly skin, third eyes, bony plates, and breathing fire and growing at a rate that, given enough time, will require four earths to feed.
Up to this point, the saving grace has been their failure to thrive.
Looking out across the expanding urban necropolis, the the hellscape swelling like an aneurysm, sores weeping toxic oils, molten lead raining from the sky, with packs of rock-throwing men hunting down the sick and elderly, spasmodic eruptions of shoppers, the money fires illuminating the night, I realize that there is a day that I may deny ever having been here.

Assumption of Independence

2010-10-19T01:37:00.041-05:00

As I watched the heads of industrialized nations gather on the steps of the Bourse de Bruxelles last Friday, posing for photographs, a man behind me shouted, "Follow your dreams!"

I wondered, Day or night?
Spokesman Saul Changoranatan, CEO of of Blodder, Marthian, and Bewomb, a venture capital firm that targets emerging geoengineering technologies, moved toward the microphone and declared, "Our shared dreams are soon to be a shared reality." Reading from prepared notes, he asserted that "the current crisis is an advantage. Current conditions present the human race with a once-in-an-epoch opportunity for renewal, positive change, adaptation, and growth."
I looked at the clock above the entryway. It was 10:14.
Few recognized that those words were the same ones uttered two weeks earlier by an obscure mechanical engineer in a speech he gave at a high school graduation ceremony in Cantansezia, Kansas.
It was Mel Thrattlingshire, an NIT graduate. I tracked Mel down at a cafe in Kansas City a few days later. "It was my daughter's graduation," he explained. "She was valedictorian, of course." He leaned back in his chair and smiled. "They actually read directly from my handwritten notes." He looked at the tablecloth, vinyl, with red and white checkers. "I was stunned. How did they get them?" He pulled a mechanical pencil from his pocket protector, grabbed a napkin from the dispenser and started to scribble. "Aha. See?" He held up the napkin. He had calculated that the dissemination of his ideas at the Bourse was equivalent to publishing four peer-reviewed articles. "It is working out well: I saved four years of research and writing and groveling before two rich benefactors." He tipped his head back and laughed. "I have the data right here in my wallet."
I leaned over to look. "It's empty."
The smile dropped and he leaned across the table and whispered, "It's a metaphor."
"And the metaphor?"
His eyebrows crossed. "Look, bud, we are at the threshold. We face a world with exponential growth in change, an explosion of possibilities. Anything can happen. And what is possible, if we persist, will be probable, and what is probable, given enough opportunity, becomes certainty." He scratched a large black mole on his arm. I thought that the mole appeared to move but he rolled down his sleeve. "Our dreams will come true; we will ascend."
I rubbed my eyes. To where? I noticed that the second hand on the clock on the wall was moving but the minute hand was stuck on 14 and the hour hand on 10. Forever was now and it wasn't going away soon.
He said that it was a daydream that started it all. "It was during a moment of silence at my daughter's graduation ceremony." Mel raised his arm and pointed at the wall. "I looked around at the auditorium in front of me, filled with thousands of teenagers dressed in the school colors. Everyone had their eyes closed and heads bowed. Nobody said a word. It was beautiful. And then all at once, they started to sing the school song." He cleared his throat.

Warriors brave and bold,
Fists raised at the sky,
Victory is ours, Yes,
Victory or die!

He smiled broadly, looking at the sky out the window. He pumped his fist. "It was inspiring. That's where I got this idea." He paused and watched two men arguing over a parking space.
"What idea?"
"It's from this information age; it bombards us with statements, with ideas. Words everywhere, like gamma rays. The information increase is breathtaking. Did you know that an average man today hears more information in a day than an average man in the 1800's heard in his lifetime? You need to cut through it with a machete, it grows so fast." A buzzing noise came from the kitchen and he turned his head and cocked his ear. It was a radio announcing a severe thunderstorm warning.
He turned back. His glasses reflected the dark, cloudy sky and his eyes disappeared. "And it's diverging into two opposing universes of thought, like thought and anti-thought." He paused. "Sometimes..." His voice trailed away.
"Sometimes?"
"Sometimes the spheres of thought balance out so perfectly that they cancel each other out and all you can hear is white noise - the background radiation." He looked up at the sky. "Like the pinging of Sputnik in your earphones as it sailed across the blackened heavens." He squinted. "A thousand miles overhead, so far out of reach." He looked at the kitchen. "So far..."
I watched as the two men continued to argue, shouting above one another. "Too far."
"So far away - that - that's when you begin to hear things." Now Mel, seeing my eyes switch between him and the two men arguing, looked at the clock on the wall. His eyes brightened. "We just need one more moment of chance, that's all. That will be our breakthrough."
He looked at his hands, folding the napkins on the table in front of him into ever tightening squares. "When two ideas collide, you get one stronger idea. When four ideas collide, you get two stronger ideas. So, imagine the strength of doctrine, the dominion of thought we have under these conditions."
"Strength - or haze?" I noticed one of the men shove the other.
"Strength. The bombardment of ideas, the mutagenesis of thought. Dialectic Steel. We are on an upward spiral." He sat up and swirled his finger in the air.
My eyes followed his hand but I felt myself getting dizzy. "You mean heaven?"
A waitress appeared at his side. "This isn't theology, this is empirical. It's the material equivalent, if you will." She asked for his order. Scrambled eggs and toast. Just water for me.
I put my face in my hands. "This sounds like an invitation to the Roman Games."
"Rome gave us a Republic."
"And Pompeii."
"Look, the winners got a crown and glory and a seat by Jupiter." He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. The two men were nose to nose. He sighed. "We get the equivalent."
I stared at his face. Now, nothing moved except a small blood vessel on his left temple.
He gave a slight nod, then continued. "Lincoln said that government accomplishes collectively what people cannot do individually." He pushed the salt shaker toward me. "So, collectively, we can accomplish anything." He pushed the tightly folded napkins toward me. "You see?"
I closed my eyes. "No."
"What we have in front of us, is a quantum leap forward, the cladogenesis of our species. It is our moment in time. We are at the threshold of reaching unity, of becoming one, a global organism, a pan-species."
"From static?"
"No, no - " he slipped forward in his chair. "It's music, really. It's collective consciousness and shared memory and common dreams and mass movement." The two men were now wrestling. A small crowd gathered and watched. A tow truck was pulling up alongside the cars.
Then one man threw a punch. Then the other. I turned my head. "What movement? You mean revolution?"
He laughed. "Speciation is not revolution. It's ascent. This is not a political act that saves us, it is a biological act." He sat up straight again and looked me in the eye. His glasses reflected the two men fighting, like a stereopticon. They both were defeating each other twice. His face was swelling, growing red. "Imagine the world of mankind sending sulfur dioxide balloons up into the upper atmosphere and releasing their gasses to dim the sun and cool the earth -"
"I -"
"Call it our Million Man Volcano."
"But -"
"Or millions of windbreaks in the Gulf of Mexico to break up hurricanes - a public works project. Full employment. The Hurricane Nation."
"No -"
"Or millions of people cutting millions of acres of trees across fire-dependent ecosystems. Indefinitely! Save houses and everyone has a job. Call it The Human Firestorm. "
"You are -"
"We are - We, The Ecosystem. It's time. We have spent too many years wringing our hands, passively accepting whatever this planet throws at us. We have the can-do spirit. We cannot take this lying down. This is a call to action. We, an environmental re-evolution. It is certain to happen."
I had to look away. The two men were lying unconscious on the sidewalk. Hailstones, the size of baseballs, began to fall. "Yep."

"You see, when we work together, as a species, there is nothing that we cannot achieve. Collectively, this earth is just no match for us."

Get Up

2010-03-15T00:12:00.015-05:00

"Get up."
A lady grabbed her purse. "It's too far." Her husband tugged at her arm.
"Come on. We have to go. It's getting late."

I looked at her feet, bound in leather and rubber like a Bai woman in China. She was a large woman. As if lifting a dead whale, she struggled to her feet, wobbled and grabbed her husband's arm. He tipped her forward and she listed down the sidewalk toward City Hall. Soot swirled in the street like black sea foam and passing trucks plowed through it like ore boats. I covered my mouth. "I have to get up."
"Where are you going?" A man on the bench next to me was staring at my feet. I hadn't noticed him until he spoke.
"Anywhere but here."
"Good luck." He folded his hands and closed his eyes.
The couple entered City Hall. The urban planning commission was meeting at one o'clock. Two guards at the entrance hoisted her up the steps and into the revolving door. Her husband followed. Out of the revolving door came another couple, much thinner and older.
The cloudless sky was raining ash this day. The winds were from the southeast, blowing the soot from the incinerators in the industrial zone onto the city. The skyscrapers looked like black mascara in rain. "I have to get up."
But I don't know where to go. It is an eight mile walk to the agricultural zones that border the industrial zones that border the residential zones that border the commercial zone in which I sit. How did I get here? Why was I here? Only one hundred and fifty years ago, a common man might consider crossing eight miles on an open plain to be a common and delightful task. Set your bearings, find a landmark, move at three miles an hour and you are there quickly; the shadows moving only a foot or two. But suppose this man encountered a sow grizzly while crossing a sandbar and was mauled. His world becomes a nightmare. He loses blood and is unable to walk. He lies on his back staring up at the sky. He is cold. He imagines a fire. The day advances. The shadows move out from beneath the shrubs and trees and up the valleys and creep up his legs and then cover him in darkness. That six miles might as well be the distance to a distant star. He looks up a the night sky and imagines himself standing on some random point of light - he thinks it's Polaris - but the points are swirling and hazy as his core temperature drops, his pupils dilate and fix. The distant point of light flickers and blinks. Then nothing.
Inside City Hall the couple listens to a panel of urban developers and planners describe an aerial image of the cityscape to several hundred concerned citizens. From seven miles above the earth, the landscape is segmented into well-defined, rectangular shapes set apart by green or blue barriers. The image is overlain by multicolored rectangles. Nine concentric rings emanate from the city center, which is a red dot. "It's beautiful," says the woman, fanning her face with her notebook. Sweat is soaking through her black dress, prickly with white dog hairs. The room smells of onions and cooking oil and stale cigarettes. Her husband takes an aspirin out of a bottle.
The sky is raining pollen on the agricultural zone this day. Women sweep it from steps; it pours out from grain trucks racing down the highway. The laborers come in from the field dusted in yellow, they eat yellow food off of yellow plates with yellow hands. The industrial farms and fields are painted in sepia tones. If you look to the horizon, the fields and farms blend in with the sepia-toned sky. There is no horizon, really. Everything has become pollen, just pollen - pollen that gulps down the swells of carbon dioxide by the gallons, swilling it, swelling like a beer drinker and floating away with millions of other yellow, bloated men. But the beer is made with engineered hops, spliced with the cold-resistant genes of musk ox, disease-resistant genes of sharks, drought-tolerant genes of the kangaroo rat, and collagen producing genes from chimpanzees. The distended men father children with giant thighs, multiple layers of teeth, bony plates of hair, and soft tails. They are addicted to pollen. They feel threatened by chimpanzees.
The couple looks at a six hundred and seventy two-page report that the planning commission distributed to all in attendance. It is entitled "City Planning and Vision Action Plan - Looking Backward to Look Forward - A New American City Again." Page fifty-one describes the urban canyon. "I didn't know we lived in a canyon," remarks the husband, rubbing his eyes. "Wow." Pollen clouds are drifting in from the west on winds drawn into the heat dome forming over the city center. "I need a glass of water."
His wife, feeling lightheaded after a large lunch of bio-engineered cottage fries and sausage with melted cheese food, nods. "But the water restrictions. We should have brought our own." The bun of hair on her head unravels.
A planner in a red suit coat with a salt-and-pepper goatee rises from his seat and points a stick at a graph describing security light density. "Our models show that roadway air dispersion will increase with future growth." He surveys the crowd, folds his arms, nods once, and sits back in his seat.
"I need air right now," says the wife. She purses her lips and whistles as she breathes. Her husband puts his hand on her shoulder. She throws back her head. "Can't a person get some air and water in here?"
The trucks race along the yellow roads toward the rendering plants in the industrial zone. Florescent orange grain spills onto concrete pads. Augurs drill into the mounds sending sparks of static electricity through the grain dust. Tonight, after dark, the factories will send orange, yeast-scented smoke out 1300-foot tall stacks. Downwind, over the residential zone, thunderstorms will form in the plume of smoke, throwing veins of orange lightning, like steel mills, like blast furnaces pouring out white-hot hail on remorseless villages below. The rain will coat the homes in a brown varnish. An allergy clinic will be struck by lightning and burn down.
The husband stares at the report. He is on page four hundred and sixty-six. He raises his eyebrows. "Hey, it says that light pollutants are absorbed by man-made chemicals in the earth's atmosphere." He looks over at his wife. "Did you hear that? It means we have mitigation."
She opens one eye. "Miti-what?"
"Mitigation." He drops his head and closes his eyes like a priest offering benediction. "It means we don't have to worry." The report slips out of his hand and flops to the floor. He reaches for another aspirin.
The meeting is going overtime and many of the citizens are dozing. The planning commission has much more to say, about pedestrianization, traffic calming, decay anticipation, crime design, hoardings, natural surveillance, water boards, homeless mobility, and toxic constraints. There is so much work to do. The husband stares at the flag behind the infrastructure planner, the wife is slumped in her metal chair, head tipped back, mouth agape. She is sliding off of her seat. A security guard jabs her arm with his nightstick. She begins to snore.
It is getting late. I look up at the skyscrapers, weeping in the twilight. This is the commercial zone. Here, tomorrow morning, trucks will race onto the curbs and spill out men in yellow rain coats and blue rubber gloves who heft frozen cardboard boxes onto dollies and carts and conveyor belts and move the boxes into stores. Later that morning, people march in and out of the stores, trading papers made from waste cellulose from the rendering plants stamped with portraits of fictional men and baseless promises for plastic bags filled with frozen compounds of magnesium carbonate, benzophenon3- Hydroxy naphthalene, potassium bromate, monosodium glutamate, and who knows - maybe polioplesiocarbohydrant-dimethybazelgrobbgadein, demoralized iron, glee shavings, and twice baked indifference. I don't know.
Now both the husband and wife are asleep. The commission continues to discuss graphs and charts and pages and models. The chairman is waving a stick at an easel. The sun set a long time ago. The rendering plants have been pouring out smoke for hours. Thunderstorms are raging. If the husband would just wake up and look, there, on the floor beneath his seat the handout lies, open to page five hundred and sixteen. On that page, in Section F-5, Light Pollution, paragraph 4 has a footnote. The footnote reads:

A 2009 study predicted that earth will no be longer visible from space. Researchers at the Marmarth Institute of Technology reported that increased man-made chemicals in the earth's atmosphere will render the earth invisible within thirty years. "All light incident upon the earth will be absorbed by this aerosolized toxic curtain suspended throughout the five layers of the atmosphere," stated lead researcher Hal Yunnan, astrophysicist with MIT. "No wavelengths of visible light will be reflected, we will appear black." Even ultraviolet and infrared radiation will be absorbed. "We will be difficult to detect," said Yunnan. "Data shows that persistent organic pollutants are producing an aerosol shroud throughout the various layers of the atmosphere that, when mixed, produce a light-absorbing compound so effective that not only will light not reach the earth's surface, it will not be reflected back into space...We will be invisible."

Too bad. Later tonight I will hear that the Allergy Clinic fire spread to City Hall, burning both to the ground. The planning commissioners manage to escape.
I feel seven hundred pounds fall over me. I feel weak. I cannot move. I can't breathe. I am unable to rise from the bench.
The man sitting next to me coughs. "Why go? This is the marketplace. This is where we all end up." He coughs again. "I can't see you."
I stare up at the night sky. I feel the darkness creep across my face. "I can't see anything either."

Vantage Point

2010-03-07T23:37:00.011-06:00

"What's that?" A small boy pointed up at something.
Wallace pulled his hands from his pockets and looked up, shielding his eyes from the sun. "I don't get it."
I looked up. "Get what?"
"If you throw a ball out the window of a train, why does the scenery move to the east while the ball goes straight ahead?"
I was reading the newspaper from four days ago at the time, an article entitled "Message In Bottle is Warning to Leave Mainland." I put the paper down on the bench and looked at his face. It was blotchy from his high blood pressure medicine. His face was lined and taut and wired, like a tennis racket, and there was a slight tremor around the eyelids. His eyes reflected the blue sky. "It doesn't always do that."
"It does if you are always on that train." The boy ran out into the street, his mother chasing behind him. "That kid could be standing still for all you know."
I looked back at Wallace, "But you aren't -"
"But if you were the scenery, not only is the ball moving to the west, but the man on the train looks like he intends to do you some damage."
I leaned forward. "This is a physics lesson, not a bedtime story."
Wallace pulled a tuna sandwich out of his pocket and unwrapped it. "Right, and you might think that the only scenery the man dislikes is moving to the east." Tuna was falling from the sandwich onto the pavement. He looked over at me and lowered his eyebrows. "But it's not."
"What?"
"Not from where I am sitting." He bit into the sandwich.
There were several starlings picking about in the grass; it looked like they were eating bread crumbs. One bird approached the bench and picked at the tuna on the pavement. Two other birds flew in and assaulted the first and a fourth bird stole away with the tuna. Wallace pointed at the birds. "When he lies asleep, and in his ear I’ll holla ‘Mortimer!’ Nay, I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but ‘Mortimer,’ and give it him, to keep his anger still in motion."
"What?"
"From Henry IV." He crumpled the wrapper. "Hotspur has a starling speak in the king's ears to drive him mad." He looks at the birds. "One hundred years ago, Romantics brought them here to recreate Shakespeare's world. Five hundred years ago the sun blazed a trail across the heavens, settling in the sea at night. Six hundred years ago the earth poured men off the edge and into outer space. A thousand years ago we offered up maidens to the gods of harvest. Now, the universe revolves around the self. The earth disgorges us like spoiled food. We offer up our children to the gods of war. And we can walk on the backs of starlings from here to the British Isles."
"Stop! We we have come so far since then. I mean, look at what we have done since then, the scientific advances -" Thousands of starlings exploded from an elm tree across the street. "Man, they are loud enough -"
"We haven't moved an inch."
"I couldn't hear you-"
"That's all you can hear. What else could you say?" He leaned forward and put his head in his hands. "My head spins, like a car on ice, like a plane in a dive, like a boat in a whirlpool, like a - "
"Like a ball thrown from a train?"
"No." He looked up. His forehead was sweating. "Don't you get it? I feel like I am moving to the east, faster and faster, every minute another notch up in speed. This won't stop." He looked at his watch. "Slow, it's falling behind again."
I looked at the sidewalk. "You are going mad."
"But you're the one standing still."
Just then, the boy pointed up at the sky.

Killing Fields

2010-02-10T02:21:00.003-06:00

A yellow-throated vireo falls to the ground without our knowledge.

Each year, on a Saturday morning in early October, an airplane would fly over our town and drop pastel-colored leaflets - pink, yellow, pale blue, pale green. This was part of the "Fire Prevention Week" festivities, held on the anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The leaflets had a drawing of a fireman looking at a sheet of paper he held in his hand. He had this expression of shock and determination. Something on the front of the paper disturbed him, but it was out of view. I always wondered what the fireman saw on the front; I imagined it was some fire-crime in progress, maybe a picture of a child playing with matches. The backside of the paper was usually blank but a few of the leaflets had the word "Candy" stamped on it. If you found one of these, you could turn it in for free candy at the fire station. So, on this morning, hundreds of schoolchildren would fan out in the neighborhood, rummaging through hedges, fields, backyards, treetops, looking for a winning leaflet. I found thousands of leaflets, but I never found one with the word "Candy". Nor can I find one today.
One hundred years earlier, two men had played with matches in a barn near the alley behind 137 DeKoven Street. Three hundred people died. Four square miles of city burned to the ground. In the aftermath, people wandered about, stumbling through the ruins of their homes, stunned, despairing, helpless, picking through the bricks and mounds of blackened studs and plaster and paneling in search of something valuable - a child's toy, a kettle, a pocket watch. I do not know if they ever found anything either.
So, six weeks ago I stood in a market in southern Africa, looking at animal hides and carved soapstone and ebony elephants and wooden masks and East Indian spices and bone necklaces and something to shade my iridescent head. As I paid for my items, the shopkeeper, in gratitude for my patronage, gave me a gift. It was a bank note from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. I have it here in front of me right now. The note says "Special Agro-Cheque" on both sides. It is signed by a Dr. G. Gono, Governor. Dr. Gono is the head of the Reserve Bank. The note is valued at 100 billion dollars. Or so it says. The result is this: a box of tissue paper is smaller than the stack of paper money required to buy it. The note actually has an expiration date on it, "Pay to the bearer on demand...on or before 31st December 2008." It occurred to me that if I looked, I might find them scattered across the veld, caught in acacia trees, floating in rivers, drifts of them behind granaries.
This is what is called hyperinflation, when the winds of the economy become hurricane force. There are those that say that this hyperinflation was the result of a rapid expansion of the money supply in Zimbabwe. Some say that there is a direct connection between prices and money supply; others contend that there is no direct connection. Others take a middle ground. Others say it depends. Theories abound - Quantity Theory, Fiscal Theory, Real Bills Doctrine. These go back hundreds of years. Self liquidating paper with forthcoming productions on monetary aggregate real values and net national product or structural deficit on the equilibrium price level. Sixteen men playing with matches. Meanwhile, Zimbabweans rummage through the ruins of their lives searching for bits of aluminum to sell for scrap. Eventually, they will start using bits of aluminum as currency - and eureka! somewhere, in some laboratory, an economic theory is born. Make that seventeen men. Another idea blows around in the wind.
And another vireo falls. There could be millions of them falling for all we know. Vireos and northern parulas and Acadian flycatchers and hooded warblers and wood thrushes and scarlet tanagers. Now let me theorize: I suppose that this could be a function of the total supply of birds multiplied by their velocity or a function of the demand for birds reduced by a constant aggregate supply or projected reproduction, while some always remain in reserves and besides, if we are wealthy, the birds can be traded for bird credits and divided by their demand on the exotic pet market. It might be the function of seventeen men talking.
I have spent years chasing down valuables in hedges, fields, backyards, treetops, looking for something, anything - and what do I find - another man with a shocked expression holding a blank piece of paper. Tonight I hear thumping on the roof of my house. What is it? Is that the sound of embers - or is it birds?

Shosholoza

2010-02-06T18:06:00.003-06:00

Folded up like origami, strapped into position like a man in an electric chair, fed 5/8-scale replicas of food, and forced to stare at an unblinking screen showing an endless loop of a man struggling to break free from his seat might seem to be an attempt by security apparatchik to extract some vital information about an impending act of faith-based schizophrenia or how one in custody might break free from legirons or my maiden's last four digits or the name of my favorite social security card, but the comparisons to prison life find more parallels in prison life than those actually found in prison life. I asked the man across the aisle if he would trade a package of filter-less crackers for a place in the line leading to the lavatory. Or maybe a seat by the emergency exit. He looked at my face and said the price just went up three hundred percent. I recalled statesmen before me and their phlebitic struggles in air flight and I wondered if I had been elected in absentia. "Oh boy!," I thought, "I'm going to Absentia."
I always wanted to go there. Why, I spent most of my childhood daydreaming about the place. And now, the day had arrived. I thought about my family back home. I grew misty. They always said I would end up there. How did they know?
I leaned back in my seat, closed my eyes, and smiled. This was no tiny, airless cell, it was a universe of possibilities. A new world. That baby in row 29, why, he howled like a hyena. The coughing man was calling wild game. A woman walked by balancing her luggage on her head. The man with the hairy neck in 34A bounded from his seat and swung from aisle to aisle. The engines roared like lions. Women gathered in the galley to collect the day's water and scrub their laundry. Newspapers rustled like palmettos. Nobody spoke my language. There was laughing in the back, where men were carving wooden bowls. Somebody hung a woven mat from a tree. A woman walked down the aisle, sweeping it with a straw broom, followed by a line of stewardesses singing in four part harmony.

Move fast
On those mountains
You are running away
On those mountains

Just then, somebody must have chopped open a pineapple; I smelled pineapple, I know it. Where was it? Then a woman appeared at my side and put a plate of antelope stew before me and I scooped it out of the bowl with my left hand. It was delicious. Someone grabbed my arm and I opened my eyes.
It was still dark.
Stars faltered in the moonless sky. I stretched out in my chair. Somewhere out there in the darkness I had seen a herd of hills that followed a dry valley lined with fever trees. The hills were like the backs of cape buffalo, migrating to the western horizon. Now, I could hear the hills moving quickly. Everything moved quickly. This night, the wind charged out of the west, fierce, snorting, stampeding up the valley and the slope in front of me, scattering everything in its path, swinging everything around like a weather vane - even the sky had turned. I tilted my head to see. Orion was now standing upright, directly overhead. Dim and scintillating, he trembled like an aging warrior, red and shrunken, a wrinkled, dying man. I tilted my head again and he was now the reflection of the faint civilization below, where idle men sat in the dirt beneath umbrella trees poking sticks into campfires that sent a plume of orange stars to replenish the night sky while old women folded their hands eleven different ways. An old man nodded. The acacia were swept up by the wind and their thorns fell into an argument, chattering across the valley. The wind burst over the hilltop, full of urgency. My hat blew away. The thatched roof rattled like bones. Wooden masks shuddered against the walls. Chairs walked across the grass. Termites fell from the sky. Predators, gloved and silent, stalked the bush. There was a muffled cry beneath the roar of the wind. I thought I heard a body fall to the ground.

I jumped from my chair.

The wind carried the blackness above like an animal skin, rippling, with swirls of smoke from distant cook fires and the scent of acacia blossoms and wild lemon. That smell, something like pine and peppermint and vinegar and whiskey and creosote. I wanted that wind. I reached out my hand. The savanna arched and hissed, waterless, thirsting. It was said that in the bush, lions patrol the boundaries, swinging paws like scythes, sweeping the edge for men who stray too far from the village.
This was not home, but in the darkness, it looked the same. I stepped closer to the edge. I couldn't see anything, but I heard women singing. Something grabbed my arm and I was gone.

The Margin of Error

2009-06-19T22:42:00.012-05:00

In the quest for scientific truth, there is little mention of the fact that during the course of controlled experiment or the gathering of data that the failure of the soda pop machine to dispense the right change to the research scientists altered the outcome of the research to a statistically significant degree. That explains why the space capsule landed in another hemisphere, upside down. Not only did the soda pop machine have such an effect, but so did the bacterially-active bologna and mayonnaise sandwich prepared by the kitchen staff. And the brittle cataracts in the researcher's eyes. And the phone call in the afternoon from the cousin in jail asking for bail money. This is the Wonderful World of Science. Ignore the convict behind the curtain, you are looking at Great Truths.

I think a lot about that phone call from the incarcerated relative, begging for lunch money and a pie with metal-file filling, as I walk about the boreal forest in northern Minnesota in search of things that in all probability do not exist but cannot be excluded without an all-knowing frame of reference, which frame of reference can be approximated through statistically significant sample sizes, generally numbering well less than infinity, which, doggonnit, invariably fail to consider that one sample that contains that which you, in the end, had assumed not to exist. Maybe if we maintain the sample size but enlarge the number of identical studies we can exclude the possibility. Or maybe if we have a massive amount of people say the same thing we can make it come true. Why, the sheer force of my personality might do it. But I am on a tangent and I am struggling to stay on point, as are the rest of my colleagues.
It was a lazy day about the woods and I thought it fine to engage in some informal postulations, perhaps stumbling upon some Higher Truth along the way. Make haste, I said, for a moment you can imagine that the cause of humanity rests on your shoulders. I observed: 1) I am a carbohydrate burning vessel. 2) I exude carbon dioxide 3) I attract carbon dioxide seeking organisms. Perhaps, I surmised, I can determine my "Carbon Footprint" by measuring exactly how many of such organisms were attracted to my person. Determining the total surface area I occupied at that moment, I arrived at 1.94 square meters, a figure, I discovered, that was identical to the amount of surface area occupied by the eleven heavily carbonated feral cats that lived behind our house in South Dakota in 1991 or the eight bottles of Fonseca Vintage Port 1970 in the wine rack. The wine caught the attention of a group of my colleagues, and all at once they set upon a rigorous regression analysis. For two hours, they carried out 16 repeated measurements involving eight independent variables. They found that after each measurement, the dependent variable approached zero. They were on to something. The unknown parameter appeared to be within grasp. They thought it might have something to do with the pizza delivery boy appearing seven times, clearly a random variable, but the exact function wasn't known. But they abandoned the study at the last measure; for all the while they had been carrying on they had found that their own surface area had expanded to a shocking degree, well beyond what anyone would have predicted. The phone rang and it was my cousin again.
Anyhow, a census of the black fly population that taxied about my surface area revealed 6,432 flies. This is some 3000 flies per square meter. Now to be useful, one might say that I need to measure my carbon output and I need to compare this to other carbon producers. But I have already determined that these are 6,432 random variables at any given moment in an environment where I, of 2 square meters, am in search of a species which depends upon my observation for its survival. This search is through third-growth recovering forest, stripped of old growth characteristics, choked with aspen clones and hazelnut thickets and mountain maple and balsam fir deadfall, all observed through the matrix of mosquito netting and the haze of fogged prescription glasses, beaded with rain and perspiration, while an electrolyte-depleted circulatory system produces leg cramps and heat exhaustion and iron streaked rocks send the compass spinning like a roulette wheel and the black flies sound like rain as they bombard my clothing and this is supposed to determine the nonexistence of an object in a 50-acre patch of forest.
The formula should read something like:

Where Y is the rare plant frequency and X represents independent variables including survey intensity, stand potential, phenological stage, light intensity, deadfall proliferation, drought index, spruce budworm kill factor, seral stage, deer density, slope, soil moisture, wind speed, surveyor education, surveyor experience, surveyor organizational skill, surveyor lactate levels, electrolyte imbalance, neurotransmittor depletion, excess body temperature, eyeglass opacity, cornea deterioration, cognitive disassembly, caffeine-induced confidence, memory loss, methamphetamine lab density, mosquito netting shear strength, boot porosity, pencil loss, blister quotient, degree of disorientation, fungal growth rate, bone fracture, anxiety level, battery failure, life insurance dollar amount, declining profit margins, and bitter regret. Each E represents one of 6,432 black flies.
I think I am on to something. Here we begin to figure out the value of B. The dependent variable Y is inversely proportional to the value of the independent variable X and the error factor E. As X and E increase, Y decreases. So let me get this straight: This is to say, as the probability of the existence of a rare species approaches zero, so do I.

Anytown, ND

2009-05-15T16:41:00.002-05:00

As I walk, I feel the need to run.
Children used to skip along on the sidewalks in this town. There were twelve blocks here, each ringed by sidewalks that passed tall homes with porches, whitewashed churches, a high school, a courthouse, and a business district with the glass storefronts and two story facades and stamped metal siding and bald men in aprons standing behind counters. People watched parades from these sidewalks, and weddings and funerals and political speeches and auctions. They waved to neighbors here. They raised families.
The children would race along these sidewalks, breathless, until they came upon crude squares drawn on the sidewalk with stolen chalk. They would skid to a stop, piling up behind the leader like cattle loading into stock cars. These were the hopscotch squares. They would appear each afternoon at a different location along the sidewalk corridor. Nobody seemed to know who drew them. The children would fall into line, silently arranging their clothes. Then, one by one, each would balance himself, measure his step and hop along in sequences of one or two feet, counting aloud to the last square. Then they would run along. Think of it. A few minutes balancing over distorted geometric figures etched by unseen hands accomplished more than nine months staring at a shock-haired teacher scribbling circular madness on slate.
Seventy years later, the sidewalks are overgrown with caragana and lilac bushes. The town has been stripped of population by war, drought, dust, accident, debt, boredom, and disillusionment. The chalk is gone. The school was struck by lightning and burned down. The last mayor died decades ago. The church buried its last parishioner. The children stopped counting.
Now it is night. It is winter, January, deep in January, when the sun cannot bear to watch. When winter charges out of the boreal forests of Saskatchewan, raging and slicing, and slays everything in its path. When clouds race in front of the moon as fast as movie frames, piling up on the southeastern horizon. The alcohol in the thermometer freezes. Windmills shatter and send wooden slats into the air. Cattle stagger blindly into ravines and are buried by drifting snow. My eyelids stick together, tears freeze on my face, frost forms on my hood. I cannot feel my feet. The drifts harden like concrete. I grope along one flat snowdune like an old man on the way to the saloon. I lose track. I feel the stinging insult, I hear the barking order to leave right now.
There is a grain elevator towering above me. Augers dangle from the walls probing for spilled grain. Broken windows sound a toothless whistle. A mercury vapor light washes away color. The wind runs across the corrugated steel like a child with a stick running along a picket fence. The panels rattle and shudder and peel away. The entire elevator sways. Snow drifts accumulate on the south side of the elevator, forming a dune across the railroad tracks, tracks abandoned thirty years ago.
I can see in the moonlight the steeple of the old church, two blocks to the south, standing above the 100 year old elms. It is no longer white. Decades of wind, hail, rain, snow, dust and neglect have stripped it, revealing the raw ashen wood returning to the dust from which it came. The church bell rings in the wind, steadily, unwaveringly, like a ship's bell sounding distress. And it rings in time with the swaying of the grain elevator. I look up and now the power lines and phone lines have the same rhythm. And the road signs. And the courthouse flagpole. It's harmony. The entire town sways.
I hear it, I get the message. I run.

Miss Myrna Douglas

2009-04-27T03:20:00.006-05:00

I don't know what to say.
There is a mirror by the ceiling in the corner of a hallway in a public building in our town. I walk past it every time I come to town to pay my bills. I never really paid much attention to it until yesterday.
There are times when I look at something I have seen for years and it looks like I had never seen it before. That happens a lot when I look at my wife; there are moments that she changes appearance, as if somebody who wants to be her has broken into the house and set in her chair. I look up and think, there is something different about the hair, the eyes, the shadows on her cheek. Have I seen this woman before? Should I ask her out on a date? But if I did, would she say, "Do I know you?" Yet, she sits there quietly stabbing carrots with her fork and she does not fawn, she does not gush. No expectations, no desperation. So I look down and just stare at the dinner plate with the seven peas rolling around the rim and pretend I have been in this house all along and wait. She will eventually throw down her fork and burst out the door and run down the lane in a way that I do not recognize. In will walk my wife and she will say, "What was that?" Fortunately, I do not know.
Sometimes it happens with places I have been; I see something I have seen for years and it looks like I had never seen it before. This is what I call Negative Deja Vu. The Already Not Seen. I have not been here before. And the more I am here, the more I have not been here.
So, I paid my electric bill, handing it to the teller with black hair and a veil, her torso hidden by a black shawl. She didn't even look up, she never does, she sat there in the booth breathing heavily, moving the bills to and fro with her white hands, sweeping them across the tabletop, swirling them in patterns, matching one bill to another, turning them over one by one. I stepped backwards and walked away and the lights flickered. Must be their business model. Anyhow, I passed by the mirror, the one I have seen for years, and something was different. The curvature? The placement? The color? Today it seemed altogether new. In the mirror I saw my image, distorted, oblique, spherical, like a tulip bulb, my helium-filled head and shrinking voice, the little man slipping away like an astronaut who lost his tether, receding into the black distance, hands fitfully grasping at the vacuum. I did not recognize myself. And then, I realize, maybe I am new.
Somewhere, there is a person on the other side of the mirror watching my movements on a television screen. Shiny eyes, like a housefly, watching multiple images, this person eats a ham sandwich, drinks a soda, studies the screen. I would not know this unless I thought about it and I might have no idea if this is true if I hadn't thought about it. I think I saw it blink.
At least one time it is true. I have been on the other side enough to know. I have met thousands of people, probably hundreds of thousands of people in my life, even if for a moment, and there may be thousands that I remember meeting whom I have not seen or heard from since. A man in physics class, a woman at the laundromat, a woman on the bus, a child in a hospital, an old man behind a screen door, a man in the wilderness. I can still see them.
I forgot that you can see both ways. And for this, I am grateful. I got a letter in February from my third grade schoolteacher, Miss Myrna Douglas. Red hair, green shoes, 21 years old, fresh out of college, wooden birds in her hair, loved to dance. It was 1965. She got my address from a former classmate and dropped me a line, 'out of the blue'. She asked if it was really me, recalled how much trouble I was, how she lay awake at nights wondering how to handle me, yet how she enjoyed me as a student - I made her 'laugh until she cried' - and how she wondered what had happened to me. She apologized if she made me fall out of my chair.
I fell out. I had no idea there was someone on the other side. This was my favorite teacher in grade school, the only one who was not an adversary, a creative, patient, young teacher who figured out how to channel me rather than sanction me, to whom I was grateful as long as I was able to maintain. At the end of the third grade, I told her that, once I realized she would not make me sit in the hallway, she was 'OK.' Was that a thank-you? Leaving the third grade, I carried the experience for the next three or four years. It gave me a sense that somewhere in this world I could fit in and be understood. I tried to find her again. I rode my bike to her house a couple times that fall, I found her once, we chatted. I stopped in her classroom. We chatted. One moment in fourth grade she appeared at the end of the hallway - I had been banished from the class and was sitting in the hall - and I jumped up when I saw her, but she turned around and walked away. Now she tells me that she was choked up, seeing me banished to the hallway. She moved on by the time I got to sixth grade, and then I walked into the fog of adolescence and the tar pit of moral revolution and that haunted mansion they call high school and forgot everything. I had no idea that I had been on her mind for 44 years. Where was I?
We were able to correspond for about six weeks. We wrote back and forth about six or seven times. She took a while to reply, and I figured it was due to a busy life. I didn't want to be a bore. But I had to admit it was thrilling to read her observations, her recollections. It filled in a lot of the gaps in the puzzle of my life, gaps I would never expect to fill, gaps normally filled with imagination. I imagine that I graduated from college. I imagine that I learned to read and write. I imagine that I was a child. Too much of my life is imaginary as is. It explained why I had a hard time reading in first grade, the social damage from my classroom exiles, the disrespect I had for teachers. But in her fourth letter, on March 10, she mentioned a battle with cancer, and that is the last I heard from her. I worried that my letters were taking something out of her. I talked about winning the battle. I told her stories. Her daughter sent me the next letter: Myrna died on March 28.
Now, the light flickers and the hallway grows dark. The curtains close.
It gets so quiet out here sometimes. Nobody comes by. Nothing moves. Not even the breeze. Everything looks the same, nothing is new.
I am growing old again. I have been exiled.
Come this way, please.

No Man's Land

2009-04-22T22:04:00.006-05:00

"Duck."

Another bottle sailed over my head. Two mobs threw bottles and rocks at each other in the street outside the legislature. We slipped into the lobby of a tall building. "What's the dispute?"
Sergei scratched his head. "It started a long time ago. Somebody wanted to pass a public works bill authorizing a four-lane bypass for MacArthur Avenue. But there was a dispute about the dimensions. And then more dispute about the wording. Some said there is a technical difference between a pedestrian and a civilian. So they got some experts to come in from the University and they testified. But that only muddied the waters."
"Really? How could they muddy it. I mean -" Twenty men overturned a bus. Twenty other men turned the bus back on it's wheels.
"Well, at first, they found out the units of measurement were flawed, shaved a centimeter or two, like a butcher's thumb on the scale. So they found a fall guy and fired him. He got a job working for the treasury. Somebody threw him out a window. Engineers said that the flawed units meant the bypass would end up at the foot of the Forgotten War Memorial. It would be a nice view. But some asked, 'where do we go to from here?'" He pressed his nose against the glass. "I can't see." He looked down the road at the plumes of teargas and the riot police that emerged from the cloud. His breath fogged the glass as he spoke. "Then somebody forged the data. Some lady took the blame for this one. She was transferred to a research lab somewhere. So that meant the bypass would run beneath the city, buried in the Ordovician strata - where we find trilobites and primitive sharks and evolutionary dead ends." He flinched as a man hit a woman with a placard that read "Save Our Data". "Hey, isn't she your aunt?" Another man arrived and swatted at the man with a placard that read, "Safety In Numbers." Then the woman picked up a placard and began hitting the man in the back. Placards waved in the air like street signs in a hurricane.
I reached into my pocket for a handkerchief. "I wouldn't recognize her anymore."
Sergei squinted. "Well, somebody loaded the data search with rhetorical queries and false dilemmas and cyclical logic and the data was completely skewed. At that point we began to doubt if anyone had actually proposed the bypass in the first place. And whether it was worth it. Maybe nobody needed it. And that's when they realized the bypass would be nearly six-dimensional. That's one huge public works project. Probably keep us all employed until, well, until the end of time. That's when the Army Corps of Engineers got involved."
The mobs were in hand to hand combat now, ripping, kicking, pulling, while riot police arrived and swirled in their midst, clubbing hairy men with truncheons.
Sergei looked at me, pulling his glasses down his nose. "So which are you, a pedestrian or a civilian?"
"Huh?"
"Well, which are you, a pedestrian or a civilian?"
"Well, I don't know. Both, I suppose."
"There you go, you might as well be out there throwing gasoline bottles around like the rest of them, swinging from lampposts, grinding your teeth."
"Wait - I mean, how do you mean?"
"Well, thousands are pouring in from across the country, to support one group or the other. This is who they are. They live for this. Look at the crowd." He pointed to the mobs. One side, ragged and frothy, the other side, ragged and frothy, each with posters and bottles and rocks and slogans and chants. One side beat the pavement with their fists. The other side jumped up and down shouting angry slogans. The other side replied with chants. They traded insults. They threw dust and stones at each other. Then they traded sides and then they merged, shredding each other with bare arms and slaps and fists and fingernails and loud voices, swinging with each other round and round, marching arm in arm, slugging, spinning, hollering.
I stood transfixed. "It's like they are living out a man's last request, like a square dance before an execution."
He nodded. "They said a pedestrian walks upright and a civilian walks orderly. That's just what they said. And then this." He gazed through the window. A mob pulled at the arms of a man while another mob pulled at his legs. Around the corner, a group of protesters squatted on the sidewalk, tending to their wounded, picking glass from their hair. Men scaled the side of buildings, throwing shoes and belts. Women ripped children from the arms of other women. And then, paramilitary soldiers descended from ropes from above and swung into the crowd, flailing.
I looked at my hands. "Is there a third option?"

"To this?"
"No, to us."

March of Science

2009-04-06T23:49:00.011-05:00

A car passes in front of us and slips onto the shoulder and sends gravel flying into the ditch.
"That was close." Hargrave stumbles backwards into the ditch.

"He didn't know." I dust off my jeans.
Hargrave laughs, "Man, your mind has as many holes as an empty schoolhouse. The guy could have killed us." He looks at the leafless trees sagging on the edge of the field. I step to the left and wonder why I stood where I stood. "Nothing left for me to say," he says and struggles to his feet and waddles up the ditch. I think of offering a hand but this is one thing I know; I keep them in my pockets. "Hey, thanks," he grunts and summits alongside the pavement and steadies himself.
I look at him huffing for air. "Maybe he didn't see us."
"But I saw him and that is enough for me." He swallows air.
"If you don't know what you are looking for, how do you know what to look for?"
Hargrave's brow furrows. Sweat is forming. "But I know. And that's good enough." He pauses for breath.
"Look at you. You didn't see him either."
"Look, it doesn't matter, it just doesn't matter." He pauses for breath. "And eventually you find out. That's good enough."

"Unfortunately, I often find myself at the end of eventually." And I looked away. Across the field I can see a fog forming in the swale that leads to the river. The sun is setting and the cold air in the woods turns grey like campfire smoke and curls into the fields, settling into pockets and swales and drainages. It follows the ravine downslope and accumulates at the river's edge where it thickens like a down comforter, so thick that you wouldn't know there is a river down there if you hadn't been in this place before. A man could easily walk into that fog and stumble into the water and disappear. The current carries him downstream. Thirty days later his swollen remains are found washed up on a sand beach and everybody is shocked. They come up with stories about a suspicious character seen in the vicinity at the hour of his disappearance. He just stood and stared at the fog filling the ravine. Police sketches are distributed. Merchants keep a wary eye. Children stay indoors. Clerics intone. The stories grow; now there are three suspicious characters. Then twenty. Then a community of suspicious characters. They are kidnapping the womenfolk. They come at night and raid the barns. They eat the dogs. They can see in the dark. They can see through walls. They read minds. The stories are published in the newspapers. Talk spreads. Festivals are cancelled. Tall fences are built. Windows boarded. Then the harvest fails. Mobs appear in the square with flaming torches. The sound of breaking glass. A rope appears on a telephone pole. If only the poor fellow knew what was in front of him, the fog wouldn't have mattered much. He could have walked home and taken supper with his family, singing the children to sleep in front of the fire. I shake my head.
"Just what are you talking about?" Hargrave demands, his face pale and sweaty.
"You think it makes a difference?" I tilt my head.
He furrows his brow again, "It doesn't matter, it just doesn't matter. I always figure it out eventually. Ouch." He winces.
"Nasty fall?"
"Yeah. Shouldn't have been so close to the road." He bends over and props his arms on his knees, laboring for air.
"Now you say it."
"And I lived to tell." He wipes his forehead with his forearm.
"Hey, the river isn't there anymore. I can't see it." The fog blends into the sky.
"What river?" He lifts his head up and looks across the field.
"That one down there." I point to the fog bank.
"I don't see any river. There's no river down there." He shakes his right arm. "Man, this hurts."
"It's down there somewhere."
"I still don't see any river."
"It's down there somewhere."
"You can't see a thing. There isn't any river; there isn't anything to know."
"Yes there is."
"No. Nothing is there. I'll prove it."
"You don't know what you are looking for."
"I know, but it doesn't matter." He straightens up and shuffles across the road into the field, shaking his right arm the entire way, pausing for air. It took him about five minutes to stumble across the field before he disappeared into the fog.

Trophic Cascade

2009-03-12T23:55:00.006-05:00

There are thirty-seven steps to the attic in my uncle's house. Every step counts.
Ninety million miles away, at a spot in the sky that I never see, there is an explosion on the surface of the sun. The corona twists like a towel and plasma jumps like water in an deep fryer, sending loops and arcs dancing across the surface. Within minutes, eight billion tons of ionized iron is ejected into space and heads toward the earth at speeds reaching four million miles an hour.
Eight minutes later, a teakettle whistles in the kitchen. Steam fogs the window. A cat stands up, stretches, then walks onto the landing below the steps. Outside, sunlight drops through the leaves of an oak, and lands on a windowpane. Half of the light rebounds into space and the other half slips through the glass and falls upon the landing, spattering it with yellow. The spots move around with the wind, and the cat stabs at them with his paw. He circles and pounces. His paws never get yellow. He never eats. He wanders off, walks down the stairs and calls out at the kitchen door. He steps out into a larger world, where the leaves whir and the sun hides behind big thick trunks, and throws more yellow spots at the ground, but the cat doesn't notice. There are birds about and he has had his fill of light. Every day he crouches beneath a chokeberry bush and watches a fox sparrow land on a branch nearby. He tenses, then explodes.
The lights in the parlor flicker, the radio goes silent, engines stall, people shout.
That was the day that I walked up those stairs into the attic. Thirty-seven steps. The door was unlatched. Sunlight was smudged on the attic window. It looked like a museum. There were seven throw blankets, two chests, three dressers, hundreds of photographs of deceased relatives, a baby crib, several hat boxes filled with jewelry and gloves and more photographs of the dead and stationery, a rocking horse, a copy of Pilgrim's Pride, three badly worn dolls, newspapers, dishes, two bed frames, five lampshades, and a painting of an American Indian standing on a cliff overlooking a mountain valley. The frame was red. Somebody left their gloves on a table, as if to stay the night. I looked down at the painting and picked it up, angling it in the sunlight. As I turned it in my hands, just then, I looked up and I saw through the attic window a plane fluttering from the sky like a leaf.
I know it hit the ground - it sent up a ball of fire - the flames spread into five counties, burning six towns to the ground. But every day, that cat deposited a bird on the doorstep. Every day. For fifteen years. Today, I buried him in the backyard, next to five other cats and near the remains of 32,868 sparrows. There is barely enough room for me.

Letter from Home

2009-02-17T01:45:00.005-06:00

A man picked up a stick and threw it in the direction of a dog who then ran in the direction of a man feeding squirrels who then ran in the direction of a woman with a large purse who then ran in the direction of a mail carrier, all the while running in the shadow of a hawk that flapped twenty yards above her. For a moment it appeared as if the hawk were on her shoulder. Then it disappeared. The man looked up just as the hawk collided with its reflection in the sixth floor window and plunged to the sidewalk below, directly in front of the mail carrier. He jumped and letters burst from his mailbag and fluttered away in the breeze.

Lars shook his head. "I wouldn't have known it if I hadn't been thinking about it. And then, I couldn't believe what I knew." He takes a sip of his coffee. The waitress walks by, looking the other way, heading to the cash register. She stumbles on the edge of the carpet and drops her tray. Somewhere, a dog barks.
I ask him what he is talking about.

"You didn't hear? There is an archaeological dig next to our apartment building. They want to build another high-rise on the site."
"I haven't heard."

"I can hear the hammers all day, pounding on the rocks, chipping at the clay. I can't sleep. They split open another boulder and out waft the prehistoric molecules, the cholera and plague and decadence and it makes its way up the ventilation shafts into my room. My eyes water."

I look at his tired, sad eyes, drooping like a basset hound, the membranes below the eyes thick and red, like a second set of lids. His face melts down from his eyes like a candle, the fat accumulating like wax on a deepening frown. I look out the window and everyone looks tired. "Yes."

"At first it was random, aimless hammering. It blended in with the street noise, the rapid fire of doors and truck concussions that shake the windows, trains rocketing past, the horn blasts, bursts of raging wheels and distress calls, whistles and cat-calls and yelps. The war of sound." He rubs his eyes. "And it blended in with the apartment noise. The hundreds of television sets tuned to hundreds of disparate stations yammering simultaneously in a random, purposeless way. No selection. Nothing to hear." He looked out the window at a loud truck that had passed by the window several times in the past hour. "Do I make sense?"
"I couldn't hear you - the truck -"
"Exactly." He rubs his forehead. "Well, now it doesn't sound the same."
"It sounds the same to me."
"No, I mean the hammering - "
"Too loud." The truck idles at the stoplight.
"Right. About two months ago I noticed that each hammer had a distinct sound. Then I noticed that each hammer would take its turn pounding. Then I noticed that they seemed to be hammering in response to each other, like Morse Code. Then, about three weeks ago, they developed a rhythm, a sort of samba, at times even a bossa nova. This has gone on ever since. Today, I swear, they were playing 'Chega de Saudade'."
His face brightens and he begins to hum the tune. I look out the window and see a man pounding on his car horn. Lars stops singing and the man stops honking. He looks at the man in the car and the man in the car looks in the direction of a police car which slides into a telephone pole, setting off its siren. Lars mutters the last lines:

I do not want this thing anymore
Of you living without me
Let us quit this thing
Of you living without me

His face begins to sag again. I ask, "So have they found anything?"
"Have you heard a word I have been saying? They found samba, music, harmony."
"But have you been down to see them?"
"Sure."
"And what do they say?"
"Not much, just a lot of talk about the landscape before the city came along."
"What have they found?"
His face darkens. "They say this was once a savanna - open woodlands with oak, ash, juniper and elm and interspersed prairie with lazy creeks beneath big cottonwood trees. They found lots of bison bones, plano and folsom points, tipi rings, bison wallows. They say the land swarmed with antelope, mule deer, elk, wolves, coyotes, bighorn sheep, prairie dogs, black and grizzly bear, bobcat, prairie chickens, ferruginous hawks, sage grouse, snow geese." He puts his head in his hands. "I don't know what it means, but it sounds beautiful."
"What happened?"
"This." He gestured with his hand across the urban skyline.
"And what about their singing?"
"Ah, the fools, they deny the whole thing - they say I am hearing things."

What Was

2009-01-21T19:47:00.004-06:00

I wish all this heat in my head was generated by great ideas. I wish this pounding was something trying to break out into the open, wide, free, blue sky, fresh air, running across open prairie, wet with spring rains, winds sweeping across the grasses like a woman's skirt swirling at the square dance. She waves as she crosses the crest of the hill then passes out of sight. Such it is. Another idea slips from my grasp. I feel myself slumping in a rocking chair. Let me tell you about. When I was your age. Years ago. I remember I had something to say but I can't recall what it was. There were thousands of thoughts rattling about in my head, like a toybox shaken by two angry brothers. I had them all there in this very hand. I can feel them now.

I look down and my hand is not where I thought it was. I slap it with the other hand but it wont move. Two toy tractors sit on the windowsill, engines running. A man works under the hood of one while the other sends up blue exhaust.
One winter day I followed the wind to the top of the ridge where the woman had passed out of view. On the other side was a barbed wire fence strung with thousands of tumbleweeds, bumping and jostling, struggling to cross over into the next pasture, much like salmon hurdling a waterfall. The few that broke free rushed out into the open pasture and somersaulted and frolicked along, carefree and oblivious, tossing off bits of leaf and stem, until they were snared by the next fenceline a quarter mile away. Like holiday shoppers, they fought and clawed, rolling over each other, a suffocating mass. A few broke free from the line and charged with glee across the freeway only to be crushed by the wheels of tractor-trailer trucks. In the spring the thistles that remain trapped along the fencelines are set afire by ranchers.
There is a rancher out in that field now, setting fires. He has been doing this ever since I could remember. He smiles as the flames crack and arc across the thatch of thistles, blue smoke rising like a cobra. He has burned miles of fenceline by now and he has many miles to go. In the distance, through the haze, he can make out the grassy hill to the north of the ranch. He squints and sees the form of a woman, running across the crest of the hill, toward the fires he set in the north pasture. Flames can be seen above the hilltop, consuming ash and junipers. She passes out of view. He laughs, knowing that he will never see her again.
I feel a jolt again - what was I thinking?

Last Gasp

2008-12-30T22:27:00.011-06:00

Charlie sat on the bench, looking up at the sky. He muttered something.

"Huh?"
"What?"
I drifted off into my thoughts. I was thinking about an abandoned farm house before he spoke.
"What is there to know? What is said often passes by the mind like the breeze that swirls in the streets below an apartment window. Go ahead, try looking out the window sometime. The papers move silently, swirling like marionettes, don't they? Chasing each other in circles, turning a corner and passing out of view. The next block gets a show. The casual observer wonders if these are the very papers that are eventually caught and trapped in the bundles stacked up at the stationary store on the corner. A man follows this paper parade with a broom and a shovel. At a few cents a pound, he makes enough to purchase bread for his family on the way home. He steps on more paper on the way, crushing it beneath the heel of his boot. He refuses to take his work home." He folds his hands on his lap and looks at his shoes. "They say the horrors of the paper mills can only be imagined. One can picture the bespectacled shopkeeper, suspenders and a white shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, subduing the rustling papers in a dark, poorly ventilated room. Swinging around, he grabs the bundle with both arms and turns, plunging it into a vat of ice cold water, pressing it down, straining to hold it below the surface. Bubbles rise around his arms. Sweat drips from his brow. The room falls silent, the waters still. A smile reaches up into his face, gripping it tightly. He cannot look away. " He shook his head. "The horrors, the inhumanity." He loosened his tie. "In the meantime, the wind has passed along, and he has no idea. I have no idea. You have no idea."
I think the parlor had an old couch. A bird's nest lay on the floor. Now it is empty again.
"This is what we want. We would rather populate our world with litter that speaks than another one of us." He watches a woman running down the sidewalk, followed by a small dog in a sweater. "Now it chases us down alleys at night and we are terrified. It frightens little children when you draw a mask on it. Older people recoil at the sight of red words. Even small print causes night sweats."
I think I see the couch again. "You know, I was thinking -"
"So-" he looks at my face. "So we remain one step behind those who speak. Yet we insist that the papers move on their own accord. Wind - who knows it? Abrading rocks, dehydrating souls, skeletonizing forests, blowing out the sun. Who wants to know it?" He combs his hair with his fingers. "Is this what you want?"
"Huh?"
"What?"
"You know, I was thinking -"
"- I knew an old woman who thought that if she listened closely, she could hear voices on the wind from far away lands. She grew up in the plains, on a farmstead. One year, the wind blew out the windows in her house. Took the doors off the hinges. Filled the house with dust. Pulled the corn out of the ground, roots and all. Turned her bread to toast. So hot it melted the shingles on the roof. Turned her father's face to leather. Mother's hair to straw. Then one day it picked her up and carried her to Washington. Her parents were left behind. That is what she said - that is what she said she heard years later. She doesn't remember a thing herself; she doesn't think anyone said anything. She was only nine at the time." He looks into the distance. "To this day she stands at her window overlooking the apple orchards in the Willamette valley waiting for a windy, spring day, hoping that she will hear the voices of her mother and father." He pauses and looks at my face again.

"What did you say?"
"Never mind."
He gets up and walks away.
I shout, "Say, there used to be a man in that couch!"

Bigger Than Life

2008-06-05T02:53:00.010-05:00

June 5, 2008 - (UPI) Chicago

"Technology is the shadow cast by the future. We see our future shape in the present darkness that surrounds us." So said Princeton sociologist Leer McFlem in a recent interview in Vale Grain magazine. "Every indication is that fundamentally, this fact has not changed. Our future is presently known. And all I see is big."

A former self-styled "sociological hedonist", McFlem denounces extrapolations as 'mere wishful thinking' and trends as 'whistling in the dark.' He prefers to describe the future condition as a derivation of present condition devoid of trend. Thereby, he asserts, he dwells in the future as he is now.

"This takes a real load off my mind," he says. "If somebody comes up to me and says, 'Hey, you're in big trouble now', I can say, 'Leave me alone, I am what I was, man.'"
As a son of a Baptist preacher, McFlem knows the distortions that verb tense can inflict upon one's consciousness. "Look at what St. Gregory said: 'There is therefore nothing created, nothing subject to another in the Trinity: nor is there anything that has been added as though it once existed, but had entered afterwards.' I mean, that is pure genius. It's reverb consciousness, like the sound Hendrix got with his guitar when it got too close to the amplifier. 'I am what I was, I am not what I will be, I am not yet I am.' Think of the possibilities! Think of the freedom!"
While McFlem is the rage on college lecture tours, he has been in and out of bankruptcy court and has trouble paying travel costs. He laughs. "I can't seem to get a handle on this addition thing. The ones and threes get all mixed up. I leave it to my accountant."
So McFlem spends his nights sleeping in the car, scribbling notes by flashlight, always adding something new to his lectures. His current tour is devoted to the exposition of the influence of technology on the human evolutionary process. "It is a catalyst for accelerated evolutionary advancement. We are the fastest evolving creatures in history. Our future shadow is very large and very dark. We will be very big. I mean, we are very big."
He pulls a pencil out of his hair. "You see, the fundamentals that spawn our increase are in place. The mounting technological advances - you see them every day - these stand as bulwarks beneath the concomitant advance of organized civil institutions. The shiny stone buildings with technocrats and think tanks and speech writers and orators and doctoral candidates. I see ideas and programs pouring out onto the steps, flooding the landscape below, swallowing up everything, people, homes, lives. And in the flooded fields sprouts technology, thousands of acres of it. Hybrids, clones, mutations, synthetics, the genetically modified. It just keeps coming!" He throws his head back and lets out a howl. "It's beautiful. It has a life of its own. It's beyond us now."
At a recent lecture, several in the audience pressed him about the carrying capacity of the global ecosystem. McFlem still bristles at the memory. "I am glad I am not then now. Intrinsic to technology and advancement are solutions. Technology will remain in advance of advancement and advancement will remain in advance of technology. The two are superior to each other."
His confidence is unwavering. "I base this on eons of successful evolutionary advancement. Look at the track record. Why would it fail now? I mean, if it did, everything we know would be wrong." He ferrets a small piece of lunch meat out of his beard. "Just look at how far we have come."
He turns on the dome light and looks at the meat. He turns it over then puts it into his mouth. The light shows his face, freckled with reddish eruptions. A vanilla air freshener hangs from the rear-view mirror. "I got this acne from sleeping near the tire factory."
He turns off the light. "People ask me to describe the relationship between technology and human advancement." He bows his head. "It's sort of like the Conquistadors and the Native Americans. Each had their own virus. Each gave their virus to the other. Each virus exploded in the defenseless population and swept unchecked across the continent, consuming lives and homes and communities along the way, growing ever larger, becoming pandemic. It's the same with technology and advancement. Each infects the other and it consumes the host, invading homes, sweeping across communities; a pandemic of technology and advancement, an accelerating technology-advancement spiral in which technology and advancement feed upon each other for as long as we can know. This has no end. There are no inherent upper physical limits to what we can become. The spiral pulls us along, marching us forward, ever forward, onward into oblivion."
McFlem looks out the window of his car into the cold, dark night. "I shudder when I think of it. Such excitement!" He rubs his hands together. "All is see is an unfathomable expanse. The ever-expanding shadow. An infinite void. Forward! To the cosmos!"
He turns the key to the ignition. The engine grinds. He looks at the instrument panel. "Great. Out of gas."

My Fantasy, Right or Wrong

2008-04-29T00:17:00.010-05:00

Eddie stood at the intersection, bathed in white sunlight. He looked at the melting snow. "Sure glad winter is over with."
I looked at him. "Don't like cold weather?"
"No, I don't mind the snow. It's something else." He swigged the last of his coffee. "Every winter it's the same thing. No matter how hard I try not to look, I see Santa Claus. There he is. I turn to look away. There he is again. I see him hundreds, maybe thousands of times. He is at the grocery store. Then he is at the bank. Look there! he is at the tavern. Lo! he is in the taxi."
I watched a cab slowly round the corner. "So what are you saying?"
Eddie fumbled with a pen in his pocket. He motioned his hand at the people walking on the opposite side of the street. "Pretend you are from another country. As an uninformed visitor, repeated observations of this phenomenon would lead you to the conclusion that Santa's existence is incontrovertible and that we must introduce the children to this widespread, magnanimous, and most influential man."
"Sounds convincing, but his beard is usually false."
"But you call him Santa, don't you?" He squinted and looked at a housing development on the hillside. A house tilted slightly, listing toward the river. "And, I might add, he is prolific. There was only one at the start, holed up in a castle somewhere in the middle ages, but the fellow replicated, spread, and soon, the Santa population exceeded the carrying capacity of Europe. Competition with rats, I suppose. It jumped into the ocean and swam to the Americas. Now, there are so many that they are invading new territories in Asia, Africa, and the far East. No natural enemies there. It spreads like cholera, gangrene, fire ants, divorce lawyers. They are overrunning the place. We went to visit friends in Taiwan and I found one on the front porch in the morning. Then my wife hit one with the car. Another got stuck in the ventilation duct. Restraining orders won't work. Clubbing is senseless. Tear gas is ineffective. We don't know how to stop them." He looked down and stepped on a trail of ants on the sidewalk.
I watched ants writhing. I asked why he picks on such a merry soul.
He looked at the ants scurrying to bury their dead. "I can hear people crying when I say this, but I think I know why it is. It's like when a child is raised in an abusive household, when the father is a drunk and beats them each night. The kid is scared, insecure, full of self doubt and blame. He looks at his stuffed animals and imagines that they can speak and hear. Soon, he is carrying on conversations with them throughout the day, and he has his little sanctuary from the insanity of the world around him. While everybody could see the animals, nobody except the child knows that they can talk."
I looked at his face. The lines crossed above his eyebrows. He clutched a paper in his hand. I protested. "But Santa really talks."
"There you go again. So does my radio. But in an adult world, where citizens are isolated from their neighbors, oppressed by their governments, and exploited by commerce, once again they become immersed in fear, insecurity, and self-doubt. As he did when he was a child, he seeks a sanctuary. And the world is full of people willing to provide it - for a fee, of course."
"Of course?"
"You have seen it yourself. No sooner does one express fear, insecurity, or doubt, he is swarmed by men offering courage, certainty, and security. Like a bleeding man in the deep sea who is hacked to bits by sharks, schools of mystics, clergy, and spiritualists mob the flailing man, chomping off chunks of his life, parsing his soul, bleeding his vitality, until he is delirious and delusional, in a stupor, in that netherworld at the edge of consciousness decorated with white staircases, bright lights, dark tunnels, old friends, and beatific smiles. The drug users see it every day." He pointed at a man passed out on a bench.
"You don't mean..."
"What is ignored is that the clerics and the frightened man are equally desperate, the former for security, and the latter for a soul to drain of life then disgorge onto the sidewalk. When you were a child, your parents bought you a toy gun. When you were older, they bought you a twelve gauge shotgun. Similarly, to capture the attention of the frightened adult, clerics offer the adult version of Santa; a magical world of bliss and sensation, indulged with fantasies, populated by imaginary beings: three-headed gods, legions of virginal women, swollen, porcine men in red fur bearing bottomless sacs full of riches, scorched freaks stoking eternal fires, and mute ancestors in the clouds who bewilder them with cryptic messages: a world of puzzles, clues, coincidences, and conundrums. A world of shadows, mist, and the sound of wind whistling in bare trees. The stuffed toys are alive again, but this time, nobody can see or hear them. This world is no more real or sane than the other."
I nodded my head. "I get it. What then?"
He looked down at the ants and shook his head. "In the end, probably a little white staircase, a little white light, then what is real, which is nothing, which is nothing what they believed."
I nodded again. I looked at his clenched fist. "Say, what's that in your hand?"
Eddie looked up, smiling broadly. "A ballot! My man's going to change the world!"

Paradise Lost

2008-04-09T01:51:00.008-05:00

At night, the air moves slowly, like a dying breath, faint, humid, and voiceless. It creeps down the screen and rolls across the windowsill and sinks into the pillow. A gentle sigh, then stillness. There is no distinction between forest and sky at this latitude. Water blends with the air and you swim through your sleep. Then there is a cry in the distance, a faint scream desperate for a reply, so clear it is almost visible, like a point of light in the swirling mass of black leaves. I am startled from my sleep. It is a nightbird, a falcon. As if it were the last one on earth, its grief-stricken cry is a distress call, urgent, frantic, probing the wilderness for a response. Each time it pauses, only echoes return, mocking its call. Hours later, its isolation complete, it falls silent and stands still, a brittle black taxidermy wired to a dry limb, beak swinging in the wind.
This happens every night.
If I didn't know where I was I wouldn't know less than I do now.
My mouth stretches open like a Howler monkey. It is daybreak, market day for the birds. Thousands flock to openings in the woods and trade insults in thousands of foreign tongues. On the forest edge, tiny clapboard shacks with floppy tin roofs are perched on stilts like birdcages. Plastic bottles breed in the pools of black water beneath. I lean onto the windowsill and look toward the sunrise and see the marijuana smoke creeping down the valleys like a white anaconda, coiling down streets, creeping down alleys, entering backyards, and slithering over clusters of sleeping dogs, and passing by the drunks that huddle for warmth. Black mold smears the walls of every house, like the hand stains of a man struggling for his life. An automobile rumbles in the distance, like gunfire. A grown man wobbles down the road on a small bicycle, swerving to miss a skeletal dog rummaging through the ditches filled with burning rubbish. A small, diaperless child stands on the doorstep watching his mother's boyfriend drink and strut. He falls onto a bench seat by the papaya tree that was scavenged from some abandoned mini van that was set afire by young boys the other night. A tired woman sweeps tangles of small children off of the front porch. Electricity came here four years ago. It was followed by stereos, television, hepatitis, then tainted city water. Birds break from the trees. Music rises from the village. Seven punta songs compete for dominance.
There is no revolution. Disillusion is in the air.

Save The Economies!

2008-03-04T03:10:00.003-06:00

In today's paper.

Global Effort to Save The Economies
Sheel Mollungfin, senior economic correspondent
Newfall Times
March 3, 2008

Economies across the globe are in steep decline, and without immediate action may disappear altogether, say economists gathered in New York for a world banking conference. "Unless we intervene soon, we might as well call ourselves economic historians," said Loef Treeweld, of the World Fiduciary Institute. "We will only see them in museums."
In Third World countries, economies are disappearing at an alarming rate, and this has begun to spread to developing lands. Economists fear that it threatens the developed world. Treeweld warns, "Western lands may be the last sanctuary of the economy. It may be their last stand. We need to do something now."
A momentum builds when economies start disappearing, a phenomenon economists call "fiscal cascade." When one economy disappears, it removes a source of raw materials, wealth, goods, and services for other economies. This starves the other economies, restricting their resources, taxing their local environments beyond their ability to sustain. The neighboring economies weaken without these resources, and without alternatives, they are pushed toward stagnation, recession, depression, and death. This, in turn, pressures their neighboring economies to collapse. "It is a cascade," says Treeweld. "It is like the shock wave of an atomic blast, taking down buildings in ever-widening concentric rings."
For economic populations to thrive there must be sufficient numbers to maintain the viability of the populations. "You cannot sustain vigorous economies without sheer numbers. Drop them below a threshold, and the economies cannot interact, they become isolated, and there are no spin-offs, no further generations, no new-and-exciting products. They start to tumble like dominoes. In the end, the economy resorts to auto-cannibalization. You get salesmen selling to salesmen. Grocers eating their own grocery. Auto mechanics slashing brake lines, doctors infecting patients. It gets ugly. You don't want to watch."
What has happened in the Third World may portend what happens in developed lands. Treeweld continues, "The economy in those regions gobbled up all of its resources. The land is stripped bare, and all you have left are empty markets and mobs of hungry people raiding empty stalls. Soon they will be raiding each other. 'I will take your watch if you take my hat.' That sort of thing. This is our future."
Inflation, says Treeweld, is often misinterpreted. "We usually think in terms of supply and demand, but that is only true in a whole environment. But in a degraded, disassembled, or decomposed environment, such as we have designed in modern times, supply and demand are overwhelmed by resource scarcity. This leads to inflationary pressures. I liken it to the swelling of limbs you see in congestive heart failure. This doesn't mean that the person is increasing in stature, he is not becoming larger than life, no, it means his heart is dying."
The size of economies today has increased, placing greater pressure on raw materials and finished goods. Helmik Dred, of the Brainbinge Fund, observes, "We used to have these little, village-based economies where a collapse wouldn't be noted outside of the local barbershop or mercantile. Villages over the range or across the river carried along as if nothing was amiss. 'I hear the village over the hill burned down,' they would say, and shuffle another deck of cards. Today, the economies are so large, so integrated, and so voracious that feeding them the resources necessary to keep them alive is daunting. Our grandparents had no idea that their grandchildren would be shoveling billions of their quaint little inventions - the locomotive, the horseless carriage, the moving picture show, the flying machine, the television set - into the mouth of an insatiable colossus, our modern economy. When we run out of those, we start shoveling our children into its mouth."
And then there is the need for corridors. Dred states, "The modern economy is so large and singular within a given land mass, that it has far fewer economies with which to interact than in the past. This requires large-scale corridors over which the economy can traverse and contact others of its kind. Sadly, many of these avenues are blocked by fears, superstitions, prejudices, greed, deception, and self-interest. This is a quandary; while preventing economic interrelationships, they are in fact, the very conditions upon which the individual economy thrives. We are looking into that right now."
Solutions
And that they are. Economists are looking for answers wherever they can be found. Some are probing the underpinnings of the modern economy for an answer. Amler Schintz, chief strategist for Tricycle Investment Group looks to the 18th century. "Adam Smith, in his work, The Wealth of Nations, gave us the guiding principle," he contends. "He spoke of the 'invisible hand' of self-interest, the profit motive, if you will, that unintentionally produces a collective good for society. This was sheer genius. Like the man who builds a tower for his grain that happens to give shade to the homeless people. So what if they are homeless because he took over their land? Or they can't afford the grain? They still benefit, don't they? It's like burning down a village to save it. We can all sleep with a good conscience, knowing the homeless people are sleeping in the shadow of what used to be their homes." He closes his eyes. "We need to return to this simple stratagem."
Schintz continues, "But we need to invoke the invisible hand with more vigor than promoting self-interest. We need to create consumer confidence. Confidence in what? Not in resources, corridors, interactions. No, we must recreate the belief in the economy, the belief that the economy continues to thrive for the economy to continue to thrive."
He shifts his weight and adjusts his suspenders. "Wealth is largely the conviction of wealth - and it is relative at that. Picture the wealthy man in Borneo and compare him to the wealthy man in Lichtenstein. There is no comparison, yet each parts crowds of patrons at the best restaurant in town with a flip of his wrist. The man in Borneo imagines himself wealthy although he possesses a few stone wheels and seashells. We need to convince people that they are prosperous, regardless of their prosperity. Children are enamored with plastic jewelry. People are the same; lavish them with real wealth or imitation wealth, whatever works. The death of the economy will go unnoticed."
He pauses to light up a cigar. "Besides, the only thing that works in a depleted environment is something akin to catch-and-release fishing; you don't consume anything, just pretend you are, then step aside, and let the next fellow do the same. And, if you are next fellow in line and you are under the influence of the invisible hand, why, you just take that fish right out of the water and fry it up! 'For humanity!' you say. Well done! You have done your civic duty, you have produced the collective good. The economy will live to see another day."

Don't Ask Me What Time It Is

2008-02-20T00:46:00.000-06:00

Another news item

Don't Ask Me What Time It Is
- Go Ahead, Punch The Clock
By Melanchia Faust, New Delhi Times
February 15, 2008

Four hundred and fifty years ago, after suffering a series of imprisonments for remarks against the King of France, Justin Henri, the radical polemist declared, "Time punishes all fools who don't watch it and defeats all fools who do." Shortly thereafter, on September 12, 1553, at the stroke of noon, he was beheaded, and silence filled his void.
Four hundred and fifty years later, his words come alive. Researchers in England, after an exhaustive study on happiness, have concluded that time is the source of human misery. "It’s not your parents," says anthropologist Andrew Ahismelting of the University of Warlock, Coven, England, and co-author of the study. "And it’s not your classmates, nor your pets, your status, your boss, your childhood, your neighborhood, your bank account, your teachers, your education, your race, your nationality, your war experience, your disability, your brain chemistry, your genetics, your religion, your water, your diet, your weather, your housing, your social programs, your politicians, your...well, I can't think of anything else."
The study, appearing in the February edition of Apanthropica showed that when considering data on depression, anxiety, fatigue, loneliness, happiness, and enthusiasm, people who were aware of their age were more likely to be less happy than those whose age was impossible to determine. The wide ranging survey was conducted over the course of 7 years, and amassed volumes of testimony from nearly 7 million people in 50 nations. Co-author David Blurryflower of Claymouth College in Hangoer, N.H. observed, "We found that measurable time is such an inhibitor of well-being that life functions begin a near death-spiral once time enters the consciousness, indicating a hemorrhagic loss of happiness among those who tell time."
"In essence, it is existence," says Ahismelting. "This notion of measurable time eats into the self and the identity, outreaching the modalities of science and the probing of our research staff, devouring confidence, self-awareness, and cognition. It is a dank, airless dwelling in the lower reaches of the consciousness, it is purposelessness, it is all pervasive, it is shameful, it is an anti-revelation. It is terrifying. Its weight, throughout all time, is on the minds of those who keep it. It happens every moment, for those who discern the moment, and it will not go away until we escape it. And at that point, my friend, you yourself are immeasurable."
This deterioration begins as soon as we gain the notion of time, "when mommy and daddy tell us what the big hand and the little hand mean," says Ahismelting. "From that point onward those two black metal armatures sweep around again and again, slicing off pieces of our life, spinning and whirling, dismembering it until they have shredded it beyond recognition, until nobody knows us, until we lay alone, until there is nothing left of us." He runs his hand through his thinning hair. "It really accelerates when we put children in the classroom environment with the bells and buzzers and the clock on the wall and nap time and play time and time-out time and bathroom time and disaster time and a-man-has-a-gun time. Then it get really bad when the kids start making the connection between these clocks, calendars, and ticking noises with test scores, bullying, weight gain, acne, visitation rights, birthdays. There is no end to it." He shakes his head. "If you are finding life tough when you are an infant, then watch out! Wait until you are late for the bus."
He continues, "It really peaks in adulthood, where we are submerged in a network of temporal activities that fail to transcend our existence. There it completes its grim task as it shatters, frays, and abrades our mind. I mean, how many millions of adults are unable to stop their facial muscles from twitching?"
He looks down at the desk calendar. "This slow steady decline into malaise is accomplished through simple, daily time-based routines such as breakfast, lunch, and supper, and punching the clock at work. Also running late for work, sitting at the dentist's office, breathing on life support, boarding a plane, shopping, when mowing the lawn, when planning for dinner guests, when drying one's clothes, at a stoplight, watching a passing train, playing video games, balancing the checkbook, at the barbershop, at the beauty salon, at the pub, waiting for the bus, riding in a cab, cooking a turkey, taking an exam, playing bridge, adjusting a picture frame, thinking about retirement, shaving, using the phone, on vacation, and so forth." He takes off his glasses. "But we found that it doesn't happen when you are rubbing your eyes," says Ashismelting. "Not then. Unless you are taking an exam or explaining something you just said, then it counts."
"The effect is devastating," he contends. "It doesn't take long for a person to realize that this patterned fabric, this web of measured events that composes our life has infiltrated our being and gives it a definition. We cannot exist beyond it." He looks at his reflection in his Rolex. "We say to ourselves, 'These are my limits and I cannot escape.' At that point, the spiral is out of control."
He taps his finger on the desk. "No matter where you live, someday, at some age, you will probably run into time. It will lay you out flat like a right-cross. It will make you dizzy, you will see stars, your life will flash before your eyes. It is like destiny."
Ahismelting doesn't have any concrete answers on how some combat this malady. "My suggestion is that people need to learn to diminish their super-inflated anxiety over unfulfilled and preposterously unrealistic ambitions in the face of the manifestly depleted options in an antisocial, competitive environment that is clearly on the brink of collapse from failed communities and resource exhaustion. They can do so by exercising extraordinary denial and suppression. Only then might they expunge their fairy-tale aspirations and their nursery-rhyme notions of connected identity and existence and fabricate what may resemble genuine happiness," he says, glancing at the clock. "In other words, they need to get their confounded expectations beneath what they cannot actually achieve - the sum of which is astonishingly immeasurable."
Some anomalies plagued the researchers. Blurryflower cites the trend for developing countries to experience greater happiness. But dismissing the data, he says, "They don't know how to tell time down there. Where in the Sam Hill are all the clocks? Try to make an appointment. It's always, "no problem, mon' or 'take it easy, mon.' I get tired of hearing it. But then..." He looked off into the distance. "Many of the researchers just couldn't stay away. We had to fire them."
And then there are the detractors. Research by Anthrus Bison, a sociologist at Sharecropper University in Oklahoma, has found similar connections between the notion of time and unhappiness in some countries, but he says he doesn't care what it means. "Some people are happier and they know what day it is, some people are not happy if they forget to set the alarm. And then, in some countries the only people who are happy are in some late stage of dementia. And then sometimes the opposite is true. Or nothing is true at all, or we have no idea what is going on, or forgot to ask the right questions or didn’t bother to write anything down because we had to quit for the day. I don’t know. I just don't care anymore. I have been studying this all my life and I can't make heads or tails about it and I am just about ready for retirement. Another six weeks and I am on social security. I don't care what country I am in, and I sure don’t care if I can’t remember my own name." He closes a book in his hands. "In my life I have found that if I don't know something, it isn’t going to stop me from living."
Larry Deuxfine, a psychologist at the University of Flegmeux, France, who has struggled to understand happiness for 34 years, also disputes the claims. "In order to prove that, you must have rigorous parameters, and then you must follow discreet methods, and then you can't just prove this or that or other things or say that this is wrong or right. This study has design flaws. You have to identify limits to your inquiry then contain your conclusions within these limits. How can you make sweeping statements about undetermined age? And if you cannot measure someone, or their existence cannot be framed within the parameters, how do you know if they are happy or not? Show me the data. This study is biased toward the happy." He slumps in his chair. "Why didn’t they ask me anything?” He drops his pencil. “This thing, whatever it is, has eluded me like a rainbow on summer day. But I'm not saying it's impossible to find. Just give me seven more years to study it, just seven more years, and I will find the answer." His head sinks into his chest. "I must go now. I have another appointment."
Ahismelting responds to his critics this way: "We're correlating unhappiness with perception of time, and our science is rigorous, our methods are sound, even our researchers are unhappy. Why the dour remarks? We are confident that we can be satisfied with the unhappiness that we found." He rubs his eyes. "And we are pleased to say that, at this time, we can't be any happier.”

Millions Still Report Seeing Illusion of Chicago

2008-02-07T23:10:00.000-06:00

News item from a far, far away land:

Millions Still Report Seeing Illusion of Chicago
- Too Bad to be Not True
By Lech Welpheppian, Special Correspondent
February 4, 2008

New York (AP) - Reports tallied by researchers in Helsinki find that over 3 million people claim to have seen the mythical City of Chicago within the past four years. The claims startled many scientists who had assumed that the legend would expire once the untenability of the phantom city became apparent.
"This was not the case at all," said lead researcher Thisand Forbuthen. "And quite the opposite was true. Despite the inherent flaws, debilitating inconsistencies, insurmountable irrationality, and galling absurdity, the ghost town appears to be thriving in the minds of many."
The images described a demography that approximated the distribution seen in actual cities in the northeastern United States. "For years we have been hearing the reports. When we finally put the data together, it was really amazing," stated Forbuthen. "The ethnic proportions were what we see in reality. About half were Hispanic, just like Detroit and Milwaukee. The rest divided between black and white. And half claimed to be Republican, half Democrat. Everything is split down the middle. Just like real life. And none of the Republicans admitted to voting for Nixon. It's uncanny."
The visions entertained every aspect of a real city. "But, what thrilled most of us, particularly those of us who were spawned in an urban environment," continued Forbuthen, "is how complex and true-to-life these dreamscapes were. People envisioned traffic jams, sewage treatment ponds, crumbling edifices, pickpockets, disease-carrying pigeons, rusting bridges, jet-engine noise, twelve car pile-ups, children with assault rifles, shanties, ethnic enclaves, cronyism, pit bulls, abandoned factories, skies webbed with jet contrails, smokestacks, marauding bands of truant schoolchildren, convenience store robberies, emphysema wards, jackknifed semis, car trunks stuffed with recreational drugs, babies locked in hot cars, bodies floating in sanitary canals, a dark brown film on every door handle, stone facade, railing, and sidewalk, and - get this - even the odor of burning rubber. All the things you find in a real, thriving, vibrant American city today!"
Forbuthen looked down and shook his head. "Then it took a turn for the absurd. Many reported seeing professional sports teams. One recurrent image was that of a ball team that never won a significant game, yet remained wildly popular. Some hapless, shiftless collection of rag-tag, ne'er-do-wells, with rosy-cheeked rookies, hands full of buttery thumbs, signed for a few precious dimes, and sleepy veterans, disposed of by superior sports franchises like a worn-out pair of sneakers, in the twilight of their careers, exhausted of ability but fully inflated with ego, jostling for the best lockers, most interviews, newest shoes, biggest contract. And multi-tiered management, flush with dollars, lavishing themselves with Lear Jets, condominiums in the Caribbean, concubines, larders full of coca, awards dinners, White House photo-ops, rare-breed dogs, cosmetic surgery, and fresh lobster all the while the stadium remains a relic from a bygone age - rickety, flaking, confined, overgrown, and windswept - and the patrons, marching toward the stadium like indentured labor to the coal mines, swell the stands without any real possibility of seeing a bona fide professional sports team. The cynicism of the owners is unconscionable, assuaging patrons with cheap watered-down beer, an organ grinder, wrinkled circus animals dressed in sports uniforms, game-time tricks, merriment, and amusements, and a loyal army of team-owned journalists at the ready, able to quell any outbreak of reality with baseless optimism, false hope, scapegoating, blackballing, rumormongering, and denial."
Forbuthen looked off into the distance. "And to believe that they are walking the streets, like ordinary people...it's simply unimaginable."

Television Bites Man

2007-10-26T01:01:00.001-05:00

As I lean forward in my armchair, straining to filter the truth about some swollen, beer-gorged cinematic celebrity from the composite wisdom of six psychotherapists, one journalism major, and the obligatory, disbarred legal counsel, all expressed in manifold, high-rise discord, I am struck by the fact that this person has made a career out of convincing observers that he is someone other than he really is.

Now this has great implications, only one of which I am aware of. So long as I am convinced he is actually someone else, I would never really meet him, or her for that matter, despite having spoken to and glad-handed with his closest companion, who, sad to say, doesn't know the first thing about this person behind him making him do all of this prattle. Wait a second, aren't you taller in real life? Who speaks to me?

I will continue to bark at the television screen hoping for answers.

Well, then, the television screen barks back, and it is an argument again. Then I see this statement appear on the screen in front of me: 'Elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 are a boon to the biosphere and will bring forth bounteous growth and prosperity to both man and nature.' I fall back into my chair. Wow. Who said that? I think I get it: we are steadily improving our lot in life through the production of unique polymers, odorless gases, and inorganic wastes. Yes! The best is yet ahead! Wait until you see what we wheel out of our laboratory tomorrow!
Why, look, it's more of us!
I think we have been here before. This reminds me of the words of H. W. Campbell in his landmark work, "Campbell's 1907 Soil Culture Manual - A Complete Guide To Scientific Agriculture as Adapted to the Semi-Arid Region." This was a book that inspired thousands of people in the early 20th century to migrate to the western Great Plains in the United States to farm the land. It gave detailed instructions on dryland farming technique. If one followed his instructions closely, Mr. Campbell claimed:
"Science in soil culture and the more perfect adaptation of scientific methods to farming would result in doubling the crops in the great semi-arid belt of America. In later years I have made the statement still stronger and have declared, to the amazement of some of the doubting ones, that crops have not been one-fourth of what they should have been in this region."
This sounds familiar. But there is more - his book is 320 pages long.
"God speed the day when the people will realize that these vast plains were not intended to be mere grazing lands for the few cattle companies, but that they will give support to many small herds and flock cared for by many men, and that all the grass and cereals of the best agricultural regions of the earth will be grown here in abundance."
Somewhere on earth, an alarm goes off. Wait, does he mean to say that this scientific method only works with the assistance of God? Was he ex-cathedra when he said this? I need to know.
"A few years hence and the so called 'plains' or 'Great American desert' of the map makers will be dotted with splendid farm houses and great red barns. There will be rows of trees for wind-breaks and shade. There will be orchards and gardens...Looking far into the future one may see this region dotted with fine farms, with countless herds of blooded animals grazing, with school houses in every township, with branch lines of railroads, with electric interurban trolley lines running in a thousand directions, with telephone systems innumerable, with rural mail routes reaching to every door. It is coming just as sure as the coming of another century. The key has been found and the door to riches has been unlocked. How many millions will be supported upon this region? Nobody knows. But the day will come when those who tell of the hesitancy of their forefathers about trying to subdue this region will have to modify the truth if they are to be believed."
Exhibit A:

I like to imagine that Mr. Campbell was never seen again. But if I were to meet him, I wouldn't recognize him anyway.

Theologians Warm to Climate Change

2007-04-09T23:14:00.000-05:00

I saw this in the paper the other day:

Theologians Warm to Climate Change
'Earth Must Be Born Again to be Saved'
By Lumo Bundilli
April 4, 2007

BARMECIDE, Greece (API) - Religious scholars representing many of the world's major religions convened today in the coastal city of Barmecide to contemplate the mystic significance of a warming planet. Called the "2007 Heat Hath Risen!" ecumenical conference, it attracted over 1500 religionists from 46 nations and islands of the seas, making it the largest and most diverse religious assembly since the "1947 Evolving Face of God" conclave held in Nairobi, Kenya. While all subsequent ecumenical conferences fell short of the impact of the 1947 conclave, often referred to as the "Faceless Revolution", anticipation was high that the mingling of ideologies and the exchange of ideas at the 2007 conclave would generate theological offspring of a higher order. As expressed by Msgr. Haggid Sheath of the Byzantium archdiocese in the keynote address, "Through the transfer of ideas, we bring the synthesis of a new truth by which it is our eternal hope to unalterably reshape the planet on which we live to a one more to our liking."

I put the paper down and my thoughts drifted back to 1947. I shook my head. It would be a tough act to follow.
While the 1947 convention laid the foundation for the Simian Redemption Creed drafted in 1948 and presented novel ideas that were adopted in the language of the 1949 International Charter of Primate Freedom of Conscience (also known as the Chimp Choice Charter) and were responsible for the development of anthropologically inclusive nativity displays throughout the western world, it will best be remembered for the presentation of the nature of God as a variable heritage passed on through generations of competing clerical interests. The delegates released a joint statement, indeed, a creed, that stated, in part:

"We believe that,
"When heresy is introduced into deistic doctrinal structure, by necessity, doctrinal failure will result, culling out the weaker concepts while simultaneously retaining the fitter concepts, all of which leads to an improved image of God. It is in fact, ever-changing. This heresy was often the result of copying error during the division of sacred writings during besiegements, crusades, invasions, and inquisitions, but a significant number of heresies were the result of cognitive decay brought on by viral and bacterial plague and medieval herbal intoxication. More often, however, the heresy was introduced into the lexicon by immigrants carrying unfamiliar God-concepts.
"Fitness of a doctrine is demonstrated by its ability to survive these doctrinal onslaughts as well as naturally occurring events such as Tribunals, Mock Trials, Auto de fe, Flailings, Knee Screws, and Slow Public Burnings - helpful mechanisms instigated by the pious that select the doctrine best suited to the religious environment of the time. The emerging doctrine, having survived, is replicated throughout its niche, eventually expanding the document population into new environments, whereupon it encounters and is subjected to a new set of doctrines and naturally occurring forces - be it Flaying, Strappado, The Spanish Boot, Branks, The Heretic's Fork, or The Bilboes - thus repeating the selection process. Ultimately, a new radiant truth is born and we can behold the face of God!
"The lineage of God can be observed in relict God concepts, enabling the theologian to reconstruct the development of the God-face over time. Patterns of God can be arranged into hierarchically nested groups, often correlating with geographic provinces defined by mountain ranges, deserts, oceans, and tribal boundaries, often patrolled by bands of fearsome warriors ready to defend their ancestral lands. Isolation of divine concepts by these natural boundaries, and the reinforcement of this effect by Mystic Nationalism, eventually led to two distinct divergences in the identity of God that resulted in two new species of God. This indisputable truth of a triad of Gods has stood for nearly 1650 years. While originally unified, the distance and time between the God doctrines has become so great that any attempt at hybridization has resulted in inviable beliefs. It is no longer possible to co-mingle the concepts. It is a theological dead end.
"At this time, the correlation of this identity of God with nature is so complete that the present three-part image of God is considered unalterable, unassailable, indelible, a fact, a doctrine of the highest order, the supreme establishment of divine truth, yea, one yet three, unified yet divided, known yet unknown, seen but unidentifiable. No intelligent, rational person would contend with this and should seek immediate penance. Therefore, preservation of the existing three phases of the God-head is vital for the survival of the species.
"Accordingly, we urge all humanity to vigorously and passionately reject all relict and immigrant God concepts to retain the purity of the triad of Gods for all posterity. We must preserve the identity of God for our children. Yes, we must preserve the identity of our children for God. Help the Gods survive! Amen!"

I remember having to recite those words in church for the next six years.
This declaration was released to the media and was relayed around the globe and the impact was immediate. Rallied by the clerics, a great worldwide crusade was launched, hailed as the Thirteenth Crusade, or the Failure to Thrive Crusade. The rallying cry was "Praise the Lords!" The objective was to stamp out all doctrine that might be deleterious to the God-head. It was a smashing success. All aberrant theology was eliminated. Conceptual boundaries were policed, a large wall of documents was constructed that prevented the transfer of ideas, and doctrinal identification was required prior to publication. A concordat with the state was inked. The competition was crushed.
And now I am reading that they want to outdo the 1947 conference with one about a warming planet? How could they? This could not possibly have the same impact. I read on:

The conference in Greece was arranged with the stated intent to exceed the impact of the 1947 conference. This was outlined in the opening remarks, given by The Most Right Reverend Hoeller Spelunk, when he stated, "We are here to change history."
The conference lasted five days. Prominent scholars lectured during the morning and conducted open discussions with delegates during the afternoons. Media sessions were held during the evenings. Lecture topics included "The Myth of Scientific Proof", "The Subjective Relevance of a Burning Sensation", "Heat Accelerates the Cycle of Death and Rebirth", "Cremation and Your Carbon Footprint", "Oil Drilling Leads to Religious Conversion", "Fundraising During Power Outages", and "Sunspots and Your Prayer".
Considerable debate was held over the origins and causes of the increased global temperatures. Various theories were expounded, including the common assault on carbon emissions and other anthropogenic factors. But the audience was brought to silence as the renowned Jesuit, Jose Helios Poinsetta Agrandiza, a visionary theologian acclaimed for his theories on the thermal image of auras, came to the podium and delivered the address, "Realization of Peace through Suppression of Consciousness".
He elaborated: "History is long gone, what remains are stacks of book at libraries around the world, a few moldering statues in European cities, and spools of magnetic tape. So when we look at history, we are really looking at a present reality that may or may not represent that which occurred before, assuming that something has actually occurred before what is occurring now. What can really be learned if it is no longer real and its prior existence is in question?
"We are here and now.
"What we need is now.
"Hence, our objective is to pull the entire human race into the immediate moment and free ourselves of the burden of posturing about this or that which may or may not have occurred in times past and fretting about the future which may or may not occur at all. The only way to accomplish this is to disperse the immediate consciousness in the vacuum of space, dissolving it like a grain of salt in the ocean of being, dispelling immediate concerns, disassembling all conception of past or future, expelling the mind like a rogue, a vagrant indigent, slovenly and boorish, that occupies every spare space, at last, evicting hunger and at once, blurring the vision of the desperate condition at hand, rendering peace. It is for this that we have gathered."
Waving a bottle of wine he shouted, "God burn us if we are not here!" The audience roared.

Wait a second. I paused and thought again about the 1947 conference. I recalled a quote that issued from the highest scientific body within the theological community. It claimed that “the lineages leading to man, chimpanzee and gorilla seem to have diverged from their common ancestor . . . 5 to 7 million years ago. This is a sobering thought. Bravely, we venture into the darkness carrying the torch of faith held high by generations of stooped, howling men that have gone before us.” I remember the photograph accompanying the article. It showed a group of primates in east Asia, huddled before a statue of some war hero in a park. Some covered their ears, others their eyes, others their mouths. The caption read, "Anthropologists and clerics agree: This is a display of primitive worship of one of the God-heads."
And now, this. I read on.

As the choir, singing Nearer My God to Thee, raised their voices to a crescendo, Frelth Gaballic, Doctor of Divinity at Horsemoss University in Antwerp, rose to the podium. His face, garnished with sweat, appeared on the giant video screen behind him. The audience, clearly enjoying the festivities, swaying from side to side, joined their voices with the choir. He raised his hands upward and turned his eyes toward the sky. Tears ran down his face. His bottom lip quivered. Then he opened his mouth. "Forgive me Lord for I have not sinned." The giant video flickered.
The crowd sang louder. Some shouted, "More! We want more!"
Gaballic continued. "From this day forward, do not think anything else. It is irretrievable fact that passes along behind us. There is nothing to see to the front or to the back. Stop looking. Stop asking, Why doth the earth blaze?"
Some in the audience swooned.
"Don't listen to those reports. The reality, my friends, is that Hell is rising from the center of the earth. Yea! Verily! This is not our doing. It is divine wrath rising from below, like lava rising from the ocean floor, soon to engulf us in the Inferno."
More swooning.
"Let go. Let it go, people. Find your peace. Yes! The communion line is now open!"
Immediately, thousands of the faithful broke toward the stage, trampling Professor Gaballic underfoot, and, according to police reports, looting several thousand cases of wine behind the stage before burning the auditorium down. They spilled into the streets. Soon, the rioting spread to other cities, mobs of the faithful storming liquor stores across the world. And across the globe, in dozens of languages, could be heard the rallying cry, "Quell the Hell! Drinks for humanity!"

This could be big.

Fear of Fishing

2007-03-20T00:24:00.000-05:00

Sometimes it's what you don't know that will kill you.
It was late afternoon and the sun zeroed in on me like an arc welder and I needed relief. The air was still. Birds sprawled in the shade of shrubs. The leaves on the trees were panting like dogs. The fields of white grass were hissing, like the sound of water simmering on the stove. I avoid travel into the village on days like this. The asphalt roofs and roads act as solar collectors and send up heat in silvery billows that can be seen for miles. When one looks into the distance, the air above the village is bent like a circus mirror and it magnifies and distorts and shrinks various objects, depending upon the temperature gradients, wind strength and particular swirl. At times this effect can be quite severe. In fact, this is not limited to the summertime. I have seen this phenomenon in the Great Plains in midwinter, when there is a temperature inversion. When looking in the direction of the Black Hills or Badlands of South Dakota I have seen it create phantom hills, disconnected from earth, like castles in the sky, a home in the clouds.
So, I went to the lake. When I stepped onto the beach, there, offshore, was a man in a rowboat, flopping about like a tarpon. He was fishing. I knew this man; it was Chauncey, the retired attorney who lived on the north shore. Over the years, I had learned to avoid all conversation and contact with this man. He considered himself a great outdoorsman, a master fisherman, but was known to all who met him as a badly inflamed windbag, a self-inflated dolt, puffy like a sail on a ship, a distended sausage of a man, the moral equivalent of a weather balloon. Locals called him “Fat Chauncey.” I watched him thrash his bait upon the waters and nothing was coming back.
This was late summer, a time when the sun is well along its course to the southern hemisphere, a weary bleached traveler with bowed head, like a white hearse slipping silently over a hilltop, like a defeated army on its retreat that pillages the northern landscape, burning the foliage and raiding nearly every color until, at last, in the month of November, everything is stripped away, everything except the glacial blue of the sky. A time of the year when fish begin to gorge themselves in preparation for months chambered in darkness and cold, amidst a diminishing supply of oxygen. A time to fish.
Chauncey was an outstandingly incapable fisherman, and this was well known. As I watched him toss the anchor into the water and follow it overboard, I recalled the degree of arrogance he displayed. It was his custom to hire local fishing guides with the sole intent of showing them just how fishing was to be done. When they broke from shore, he would announce to the guide, “You might be paid, but you are being paid to watch the best.” Then he would drop his sunglasses over his eyes and pull mightily on the oars. When he used up the guides in one community, he would move on to the next. Yet, in 35 years of fishing he had never caught a fish! His excuse?
“There is a simple rational explanation,” he would bluster. “There are no fish in this lake. In fact, there are no fish in any of the waters we can know.”
Once, I prodded him for an explanation. He said, “I can disprove the improbability of what is not unproven. What does not exist is unknown. I know of no evidence of fish, I do not know of it, therefore it does not exist. Hence, the fish do not exist in these waters, and all other waters that I do not know of, or of what is in them. You should know that by now.”
One could only shake one’s head and I felt the one in my possession shaking uncontrollably. Some guides reasoned that the man, being so repellent to those above water must have the same effect upon those below water. Apparently, the word got around, for he was no longer able to keep a pet. “My parrot ran off”, he once said. The story was, if he had an aquarium, the goldfish would run away too.
As the years passed and his creel remained vacant, it became apparent that he used the idle time in his boat to enlarge and multiply his explanations. I chanced upon him one day while he was unloading his boat and pressed him for an answer:
“So, why the empty stringer?”
“You again. I’ll tell you what – the fact is, the opposite or sub-opposite has and has not been true or false nearly so often as not. And that is my final word.”
“What?”
“That’s right.”
“But say it again.”
“It has never been the same twice, you know the odds.”
“So why do you fish?”
“To show it cannot be done.”
An image flashed before my eyes, that of myself throwing my fishing gear into a fire, but I dismissed it. It wasn’t the fishing, it was the failure to catch fish.
On another occasion, as we sat in the diner in town, he offered further explanation. He patted his ample belly. “I would not disallow for unknown uncontrollable factors were I not to know what I do. But I do not profess to not know what I do. But I know there are no fish. Beyond that is mere hyperbole, fantasy. You can label it winterkill, cold fronts, inbreeding, predation. Primitive tribes believed it was the action of comets. How do you differ?”
“I ate walleye once.”
“You see fairies with gilded wings!”
“They tasted good, too.”
Then I suggested to him that there might be an information hole in the bottom of the lake that consumes all facts and renders them imaginary. For a moment it appeared that we might agree on something.
But then he turned his head away. “You have much to learn about that vacuum in your head.”
“Thanks for the inspiration.”
Eventually, his diatribes in the cafes, bars, and diners led to exile. As he broadcast his beliefs, those unfamiliar with his disposition spread the word back home: “The lakes are all fished out.” “There were never any fish up there to start with.” “No wonder why we can’t catch anything.” “Maybe the whole thing is a hoax.” “Who have we been kidding?” As a result, tourists avoided the area and vacationed further north. Profits declined. Shops closed their doors. At the urging of businesses throughout the region, he was blacklisted by the guiding community, evicted from fishing tournaments, barred from bait shops, and, by the time I watched him from the shore that afternoon - wrestling with the oars and spinning the boat in circles – he was denied fishing licenses in twenty-seven states and provinces. But this did not steer him off course. Here he was in front of me, at it again, offshore, hoisting another tree branch up from the bottom of the lake and easing it into the net. One for the mantle, I thought.
His notoriety increased. His image was posted at boat landings, with a fair warning. News media interviewed him. Parents warned their children. Schoolteachers told cautionary tales. The Legend of the Sea Lout. The Epic of the Perilously Listing Nanoid. Captain Bombast, Where Have You Been? Flotsam Meets Jetsom. The Man Drifts. Fables of a seaman just slightly more advanced than the crustaceans he impaled on the hook. A man repeatedly outwitted by wooden lures. This only served to intensify his determination to prove that the fish did not exist.
What drove him to this? I have often thought that it may have been something as simple as a lack of patience. No matter how much effort he infused into the art of fishing, he could not find it within himself to sit motionless in a boat, holding his arms out stiffly, waiting for hours, even days, until that moment when he sensed the slightest twinge in the line, at which moment his mind estimated the mass, depth, and species of the fish, calculated the time necessary for ingestion, the arc of the pole, torque of the hookset, tension of the drag, and length of play. No. He would stir, rise, fold his seat cushion, grab an oar, change a lure, move from seat to seat, lift anchor, drop anchor, change hats, whistle, sing, remove his shirt, fiddle with the oarlocks, tap his feet, inspect his fingernails, write in a notebook, read a book, wave at other boats, and, in the end, stumble over something in the bottom of the boat and end up flailing about in the water.
So this afternoon, I decided I had seen enough. I was about to give a little advice. I called out to him.
“Chauncey!”
“Go away.”
“No, listen to me.”
“What is it now?”
“Try live bait, a sucker on a number-six hook.”
“What for?”
“It increases the odds. Especially under these conditions.”
He responded with the usual dogma, there aint no fish in the lake, fish are a figment of the imagination, mystic blips on the mind, vestiges of primordial man that well up in the senses when under stress, a child’s slimy toy stuffed with ignorance, fear, and insecurity, swirling images produced by oxygen deprivation and most certainly, the sunstroke suffered by all fishermen, and so forth and so on. I waited until he lost his breath and I said it again.
“Been in the sun too long today?”
“Shut up.”
“I mean it, try live bait; a sucker on a number-six hook.”
“What is your problem?”
“Scared to try?”
“Look, little man, I will do it just to prove to you it cannot be done.“
“You can tell everyone it was your idea if it works.”
“Then will you go on your way and keep your ghosts to yourself?”
“Nobody else can see them anyhow.”
And he opened his tackle box, removed the plug from his line, and baited it with a sucker. Then, after glaring at me for a moment, he tossed it out into the open water.
“I got a big one out there once,” I said.
He didn’t say anything.
Suddenly, his rod bent double.
“What the…”
The rod was trembling, the tip touched the water. The boat tilted. The rod tip plunged under water and he nearly lost his grip.
“This can’t be!”
“Don’t horse it.”
He didn’t say anything. Now the fish was heading under the boat. He leaned over the side of the boat to look.
“My god…”
All at once, he threw his rod overboard and waved his arms.
“No, no - I can’t bear to look.”
He fell into the water and disappeared from sight.
And he was gone.

Don't Try This At Home

2007-03-08T02:46:00.000-06:00

“The absence of anything proves something, but what it is, it is not until I decide.”
So began the treatise entitled "The Sovereignty of Subjective Consciousness" by the eminent Spillford University biologist Marvell Hummelline. This became the rallying cry of hundreds of thousands of his followers during the tyrannical Days of Haze during the early 21st century.
Where I was then, I am not sure. Sometimes I think I was attending the university at the time, other times I don’t know what to believe. I think I learned that in class. Sometimes I think I recall the turbulence of the crowds, the ebullient clouds of dust formed by the stomping masses of believers, the outstretched palms, skyward faces, innumerable men and women weaving to and fro as Dr. Hummelline railed against the immaterial, the immeasurable, and the nonexistent. I can still see him standing on the bed of a pickup truck parked in the square in front of the student union, one hand waving his treatise, the other stiffly outstretched, as if groping for one of these immaterial, nonexistent objects. I can still hear him shout:

They only exist in your head!
What do you see?
Repeat after me!

I do not think I did, but I was starting to feel a little out of place. The crowd chanted his words for a while and, when the police arrived with batons and teargas, they quickly disappeared. Most filtered into the bars and clubs that circled the square, where, I assume, after several hours they began to see the invisible, the immeasurable, and the nonexistent. Dr. Hummelline did not follow them.
I saw an interview of him on the television that night. I happened to be playing poker with my friends and, although I was in the middle of a winning streak that had extended over three decades, I was able to divert my attention from yet another hand full of consecutive spades to listen in on this exchange:

"Dr. Hummelline, it looks like you are in it for the money."
"How can you say that?"
"Well, maybe it’s not the money, maybe it is the random ethics."
"How can you say that? How can you know what I am thinking? Can you read my mind? Go ahead, find my mind! "
"Well, I can surmise – "
"Low blow! Direct observation of me is impossible."
"But you do give evidence –"
"Well, you interpret it badly."
"Maybe you don’t exist."
"Nothing can be disproved if given enough time! I am human!"
"Then disprove it."

The next day was a Sunday, and the faithful were seen in the houses of worship that towered over the city. I wandered by one of these, a squat sandstone block building that spilled onto the sidewalk, pretty as a sow at the county fair. I don’t know which denomination it may have been, but I can say that it was cold outside and several homeless persons were gathered around a display in front of the building entitled “Hellfire.” It featured a large concrete basin that, instead of water, sprayed fire into the sky. A woman threw some coins into the basin. It provided some comfort, I guess.
Inside some cleric was working the crowd. Hands were in the air, arms were reaching high, feet were stomping, voices wailing. The cleric was shouting some words. I strained to hear.

It exists in your head!
What do you see?
Repeat after me!

And they did.

Later that day, these same folks were seen in the bars around the square, casually mingling with the folks who had been listening to Dr. Hummelline on Saturday.
The following weekend the newspaper carried a story. It reported that Dr. Hummelline went home to his wife directly after his interview on the television. She had bought him a new fishing rod for their anniversary. When she presented it to him, he was said to respond, “Ah, another random event.” His body was found five days later, face down in a lagoon outside the biology building. When they pulled his body out of the water, onlookers said that his arm was outstretched.

The Mirror Speaks

2007-03-05T02:34:00.000-06:00

Some people look in the mirror and see apes.
Now, I used to find that hard to believe. It was incomprehensible, tomfoolery, puffery, something that I would never understand. A vapid illusion, I reasoned, and I could I pass on in respectful silence, much as I would a street performer singing out of key. So what if he doesn’t know. He is the one who will go without food, leaving more for me.
But then one day, I saw it. I had just finished my daily ritual of grooming - with its mass-shaving, clippage, de-limbing, defoliation, excision, cauterization, unction and penance. When I looked up into the mirror I saw a simian. A primate. The ape-man. Mr. Piltdown, I presume. A man with long arms, protruding jaw, sloped forehead, and crestal ridge. Who was this? Was it a bending mirror? What had I become? It reminded me of the headline in Weekly World News© announcing that Shaved Apes Were Being Sold As Human Babies. Could it be? Would I be kidnapped? Sold as a slave? I saw myself locked in some warehouse along a deepwater dock, rays of the setting sun shining through the gaps in the corrugated steel siding, illuminating dust in the air, casting ribbons of light on my bony figure that sat chained to a desk and slumped over a sewing machine. I began to sweat. But, the notion was short-lived; as soon as the creature in the mirror started to speak, it became man. We carried on a lively, rather reassuring conversation for five minutes and he left as soon as I had talked myself out. Good thing, I had to get to work and so did he.
On the way I was thinking about the effort to teach apes sign language. Stories circulate that the apes are learning well. Some can sign many words. Some even make sentences. So they say. Sure, we all sit on the edge of our seats, breathless, waiting for the uncharted wisdom, radiant truth, profound musing and effulgent insight to slip from their weathered grey lips and redirect our sodden souls. Hark, The Ape Speaks!
But then, I wondered, maybe we don’t know the whole story. You know how it goes: maybe these apes are teaching us how to speak. We laugh when the chimps put on their show, riding tricycles, dressed up as cowboys, mugging for the cameras, but when they go offstage, out of the site of Homo sapiens, they sit down over a glass of wine and discuss theoretical physics, speaking in an ancient tongue they picked up while mimicking an archaeologist they saw on public television the night before. They had a good laugh at the way the fellow tripped over his words, rolled his eyes and moved his mouth.
Nah.
So I swung into our village. A breezy spring day, apple blossoms scattered in the sky, dust devils twisted in the fields, high cumulus moved in from the west. Promise was in the air. As I walked in front of the grocery store I saw two men arguing about a parking space. I watched them for a while. The larger man got his way; he swung his arms a lot and then the smaller man backed away, all the while displaying this big toothy smile. I passed by the beauty salon next door and the billows of perfume rolling out the door made my head turn, and inside I saw a woman picking through another woman’s hair. Other women were lined up, chatting, waiting their turn. I rounded the corner and looked down the alley. I could see several young men relieving themselves against the walls. Nobody would come near. Up ahead, a man walked out of a bar with another man’s wife. She was from a neighboring town. I think he had her by the hair. On the curbside, two women were fighting over a baby carriage. They were screaming with such ferocity that it was impossible to make out what they were saying. One shoved the carriage into the street, just missing an oncoming car. Down the road, by the school, I could see a crowd of adults at the soccer field. Arms were in the air. Children were being gathered up. It looked like a brawl and it was headed my way. Time to go.
I ducked into the café and sat down and ordered a cup of coffee. The news was on. It showed footage of something really big blowing up somewhere; I almost dropped my cup. Then there was a scene of many agitated people at some conference shouting at each other in several different languages simultaneously. Then lots of important people started showing up on the screen and explaining what was going on and then they started shouting at each other and I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then I saw crowds of angry men clubbing another crowd of angry men who were clubbing another crowd of angry men who were, I think, clubbing another crowd of angry men. I was looking for who started it all but it ended up that the last group was clubbing the first group. I turned it off when I saw thousands of peace marchers set fire to a nursing home.
I called the waitress to me and asked for a newspaper. She brought one over and I paid my bill. I spread the paper on the counter and looked at the headlines.

“Personal Thermonuclear Device Seen As Key to Safe Neighborhoods”
“Hellfire Doctrine Provides Model for Effective Torture Sessions”
“Improving Your Child’s Self-confidence with Anabolic Steroids”
”Science Engineers Completely Disposable Child”
“Study Shows Repeated Political Fallacies Evolve into Truth over Time”

What? What is this? What next, Shaved Apes? The man next to me reached for my paper. I sputtered, lost for words. I jabbed the fork into his hand. He rolled his lips back and gave a big toothy grin.

Bad Trip

2007-02-05T01:23:00.001-06:00

Twenty-eight years ago, during the widespread malaise and recession that plagued the American community, marauding bands of developers and realtors spread throughout the fields of what was once western Cook County, Illinois. For weeks I could see the dust from their caravans on the eastern horizon. One morning I was awakened by the dishes falling out of the cupboard. I could feel the rumble of their wheels. I knew it was time to leave. At midnight I gathered up my few belongings, stuffed them into my yellow Volkswagen Beetle, and fled, heading north to the Wisconsin border. It was not a moment too soon. I vacated just ahead of several caravans of heavily armed house-hunters. I think I saw lawyers too.

As I crossed into the land of milk and cheese, I could see the red glow on the low-slung clouds to the south. Savannas were being burned, prairies pulled out by their roots. Families bribed with cheap metal trinkets to give up their will. A heritage lost. A proud nation humiliated. One could find the parents, shaved and shamed, forced to give up their shovels and pitchforks, standing on street corners with briefcases, dressed in white shirts, staring at the sky. And their children, listless, packed into cinderblock compounds, struggling to learn a new language. Can you say "means of production"? "Division of labor"? "Standard of living"?

Here we go again.

Does anyone know how to say "limits to growth" or "resource depletion" or "failure to thrive"?

Ah, what do I know.

Well, I settled in the north country, a region populated with lakes, bogs, rivers, far away from the ravages of the great land wars that raged to the south. The conversation of birds threading through a breeze that shattered the surface of a lake that reflected the star filled sky at night. Everything was clear, the edges were defined and sharp.

But there were tiny hills that the locals insisted on referring to mountains; I.E. The Porcupine Mountains, Rib Mountain, Blackjack Mountiain. Now, this qualifies as an embarrassment. These are not mountains at all. I have seen the aged run up and down their gentle slopes for hours without tiring. A strong wind might move one several miles before a gaggle of schoolgirls gather and tow it back to its place. But some say, what is the harm? Why should one prevent anyone from indulging in a playful illusion from time to time?

That is, if it does not involve mind-altering drugs. To refer to them as mountains gives the impression of grandeur and sweeping majesty, it conjures up talus, cliffs, stunted spruce flagged by wind, icy lakes, amphitheatres. The random sweep of avalanches, a team of starved pack horses, ribs like piano keys, and gaunt men wandering around in circles. A jumble of stranded war wagons, smoke rising from the burning wreckage, things like these. I suppose I can look up at these hills and imagine such things. I am a mountaineer for a day. No harm done.

But, twenty-eight years later, the developers have made their way into this northern community. I see families selling their lives for small metal trinkets, the children being corralled into wagons and shuttled to education camps. I hear people talking about means of production, division of labor, standard of living. It is happening again. My dishes rattle. Someone tells me I am seeing things.

But I want to know, Where will all of this lead? I want to see the future, so I steel my nerves and pull my car onto that road that leads to the south. I am heading back to the wreckage I left behind.

And I see blocks of houses, tumbling out of the city center, stacking up at first, like the rush hour traffic, but further out, they fall into rows, tightly packed, with midget shrubbery and trees. The air is a blue haze at ground level, but above the trees it becomes brown, in fact, the whole metropolis has a brown dome. I guess the wreckage still smolders. But what is this. The community is named Prairie Creek View, but there is no prairie, and there is no creek, and there certainly is no view. My eye catches a culvert, presumably to subdue the raging prairie creek, but instead of water, it spills lost toys into a dry creek bed.

I look up at the brown haze and inhale. I cough. I feel dizzy. I feel drugged.

Farm Collective Memory

2007-01-27T22:47:00.000-06:00

Sometimes the sun sets more than once in a day.
Just the other day, while walking on the prairie, heading west into the late-evening sun, I saw a glint in the light. This jogged my memory, and for a moment, I was five hundred miles to the south on another prairie, another day, standing in a flimsy wooden shack built over a dugout out on an endless level plain, facing a wind I could never have imagined. The wooden slats stammered around me, the framework groaned, the shingles sliced away, the door flew off the hinges, the windows opened wide, like a mouth, howling, stripped of the rags that had been burned for fuel long ago. The wind ripped across the bare earth, spitting dirt and fragments of brittle blonde grass, screaming like a man who had just lost his wife.
In every direction were fields turned by the plow, raked with furrows, and not a leaf in sight. It was a sketch in charcoal. There were more shacks in the distance, all shedding pieces of wood and glass in the wind. To the north, in the distance, was a black wall, no, a black cloud, roiling across the plains, tumbling like a freight train that jumped the tracks. Tumbling in my direction. It was two hundred feet tall, maybe more. But there was no rain in this cloud; the smell of wet earth and grass was not in the air. A deep breath was countered with a punishing cough. Nothing but dust. Sheets of it were swept up ahead of the cloud. Then clumps of soil. Then stones. The wind hurled them at the shack, hundreds at once, a continuous barrage. I heard a bang and turned my head to see the door bounding away. No sooner I glanced back and the cloud was across the yard and it came so swiftly that I hadn't the time to cover my face. It was upon me, turning midday to midnight, absorbing the light and air, swelling my clothes with plumes of black earth, sandblasting my skin. I ducked down, buried my head in my arm, and pressed my eyes shut, wincing as I heard debris slam against the walls of the shack. The sound of pots, buckets, fenceposts, birds, sheet metal, licence plates, dinner plates, ledgers, bonnets, shovels, milk cans, windmills, housecats, rain barrels, telephone wire, chickens, and a Bible. I think I heard a woman cry.
This went on for hours. The dirt poured in between the slats, filling the dugout like black snow, forming a drift as high as the roof. I struggled to breathe. I dug into the ground to make an air pocket. My hand fumbled upon an object, about the size of a child’s fist, square, it felt like glass. I don’t recall what happened after that.
The next day, the winds subsided and at last, I was able to tunnel out. I stood on the prairie, bathed in sunlight. Dunes of dirt could be seen all the way to the horizon, it was a black Sahara. A meadowlark called - the voice sounded like a question. I had no idea. I felt the object in my shirt pocket. I pulled it out and held it up to the sun. It was clear glass, it glinted in the sunlight. It was an inkwell. I turned and looked at the scattered remains of the shack. Why, it had been an old schoolhouse.
Now, decades later, on a prairie to the north, perhaps the very prairie that coughed up the soil for that dust storm, I stood looking to the west and I saw that glint again. I stooped to look. Same shape, same glass. It was another inkwell. My throat felt dry. I looked around for a dugout. There it was to the south, about twenty yards away. I cleared my throat. Same boards, same windows. It was another schoolhouse. It stood in the middle of a plowed field. The furrows were deep, the clods as big as boulders. The field continued into the distance where it met another plowed field which continued on until it met another plowed field, which met another plowed field, then another field, then another two or three, I could not tell, and then the horizon took over. A breeze swept up from a swale and rattled the dry grass. I picked a blade and it turned to powder between my fingers. I looked up. The sun had dropped out of sight. Soon, it would be dark again. I had to hurry, I had to go down.
I know I could not possibly remember all I that I had seen years before - but I thought, it is darker still when I don't remember what I had never known.

The Center of the Universe

2007-01-18T00:07:00.000-06:00

The other night, while looking up at the sky filled with stars, I think I saw something move.
The experts tell me that there is a lot of majestic chaos up there, with galaxies colliding, stars exploding, wobbly planets, rampant radiation, flares, dust storms, gas bags, and those sinister black holes lurking in the shadows, ready to chomp down on everything that passes their way, swallowing it whole, digesting it, then vomiting it out into a make-believe world devoid of time and space, where everything becomes once upon a time and far far away, but I am not talking about that.
What I mean is, there are some things we take for granted, like the sunrise, the sound of birds, or the sunny side of the moon. What would it be like if one day the moon rose above the horizon and presented a new look? Instead of that tarnished silver face, suppose it waxed green, displaying a visage of pestilence, pocked with pustules, a death mask, feverish with pox - just the way I was told it would appear someday - in those terrifying nursery rhymes I was forced to read as a child. What then? I suppose markets would crash, armies would disband, politicians would bow their heads, clerics would cover their faces in shame. We could only hope.
My aunt and uncle lived in the state of New Jersey. They had a dog named Prince. I saw him when I was in first grade. He was a big collie. I could reach out and hug him around the neck. I did not visit them for another ten years, not until I had reached the eleventh grade. I stepped into their house and a dog came running up. A small shaggy dog about knee high. My aunt said, "Oh don't mind Prince."
I said, "No. That's not Prince."
She said, "Yes it is."
"No. It can't be."
"Yes, it is."
I coughed, "Who pulled the plug and let him out?"
I was stunned, he looked like a small scale replica of the original, something you pulled out of a box and glued together and put up on the bookcase. Was he shrinking all these years I was away? Were they feeding him? Was he disassembled? Was I going mad? That night I had a very bad dream upstairs in my cousin's bedroom. Perhaps.
If you take something for granted, you won't pay attention. If you don't pay attention, you don't notice things change.
So there, above me are the heavens, the big fireworks factory torched by arsonists, the spilled bag of gold and silver coins, the silent war movie. And as chaotic as it appears, it is not chaos. Chaos is in the eye of the beholder. Chaos describes knowledge beyond our grasp, the ignorant man's thesis, a dismissive slur. But in reality, everything is on schedule and on track. Split second precision, sub-meter accuracy, fully synchronized. Law abiding matter. These are highly trained rocks! So why would anyone with breeding higher than that of an organ-grinder prostrate himself to these dim-witted balls of ice fire and rock? It is beyond me. Might as well worship the mail service. That alarm clock you set last night. The one-eyed cat that shows up on the front step each morning begging for a dish of milk.

And all of the sudden, there was a shift.
At first I thought I lost my footing. But I was standing still, leaning up against a White pine in our front yard. Then I thought it must have been an earth tremor and my position on the planet moved a foot or two. But everything was still, nothing swayed. That is when I noticed everything had set back in the sky, slipping to the east several degrees, almost as if time had lurched backward a half hour. The moon fell down behind the trees. Everything moved, the planets, the stars, and I assume the sun. It did come up later the next morning, too much later to be accounted for by the tilt of the earth. I overslept.
In the dark ages they thought everything revolved around the earth, an egocentric notion that belied the notion that humans were the most important thing in existence. Along came some astronomers who deduced that, with the exception of our modest moon, nothing revolved around the earth, in fact, the motions of the planets, stars, comets, and sun was essentially independent of the earth. This was shocking. For this, these men were garroted and stretched like salt-water taffy.
The ball thrown from the train traveling through a vacuum appears to be on a straight line to the person on the train, but to the man on the ground, the ball travels on a curved trajectory. Eventually both men succumb to oxygen deprivation, but not before they discover an important truth: It is a matter of perspective. The sky appeared to shift to me, but to the poor man floating about in space, it was the earth that moved.
I have heard that this is impossible. 'Nothing could possibly bump the earth, jostle it, give it a nudge. Certainly, it cannot be us. It is too big. We are too small. The planets do not revolve around us. The universe is independent of us. We have no significant impact. This is a fact. To suggest that man has fundamentally altered the nature of the earth is shocking. Some things never change.'
You said it.

No Trespassing

2007-01-10T22:51:00.000-06:00

What next.

I have this recurring dream of a mountain meadow. The meadow faces to the southwest. It is painted in late evening sunlight, the white setting sun you see only after a fresh cold rain. The rainclouds are breaking up to the east. Cold fog follows the valleys toward the dark canyon below. The wet sedges are dazzling; millions of suns captured in raindrops. The meadow is surrounded by a forest of black Douglas fir.

I am not sure why it keeps coming back to me, or why I keep going back to it, but I felt as though I could have slept forever. Such adventure! Another night, another wilderness journey. I wake up with a beard and howl.

For years I tried to place this dream in reality. I almost found it in Montana. A couple of years ago, when looking to the east at the Beartooth Mountains in Paradise Valley, I saw a sideslope cast in that white evening light, with cobalt blue clouds slipping into the shadows behind the mountains. The trees were Douglas fir. I think I saw a sedge meadow between the trees. I was five miles away at the time. Then I moved and I was one thousand two hundred miles away. But when I slept, I was there.

Then one day, while walking in town, a photograph blew by my feet. I stooped to pick it up. I thought, I must be dreaming. It was the mountain meadow. The Douglas fir, the sparkling sedge, the white sunset, it was all there.

I brought the photograph to an art gallery in town to have it mounted. I imagined it on the wall in front of my desk, visible all day long, inviting me to jump in. I couldn't wait. A week later, when I came by to pick it up, the gallery owner remarked that he had seen the place before. I looked up and asked him where.

"You already told me."

"What did I say?"

"Somewhere."

"I don't believe you."

"Neither do I, but I was there."

He thanked me for the business, smiled, and said he would be back.

He was right. The next time I had a dream about that meadow, the art dealer was there, standing around with his hands in his pockets, staring at the sunset. Motionless. I was a little surprised but made no fuss. After all, the man just stood there. And was it not magnanimous of me to allow some stranger to enjoy the view? Why chase him away? And, sakes alive, the fellow was an art dealer; he could appreciate it. So I walked over a rise and kept out of sight.

Well, he has been there every time since. For a while, he just moved his head a little, looking at things, the sky, the trees, the meadow. He seemed enthralled, wide open, with a big smile. This cheered me. I was not alone. Others saw what I was seeing. But as the days turned to weeks, he started moving around, rummaging in the brush, poking at the ground, clambering across the rocks. This made me nervous. My sleep was shallow, the sort of sleep you have if you have coffee before bed. Then he started to make noise, rattling the branches, tipping things over, talking to himself. This startled me and I found myself waking up in the middle of the night.

Lately, it has gotten worse. He invited several of his friends and they gathered a pile of rocks and dammed up the creek that goes through the meadow. I woke up in a cold sweat. I think they were drinking. The next night they brought out some axes and cut down a swath of the Douglas fir. Then last night, in the distance, I heard the sound of engines.

My God, I am terrified to go to sleep.

Fully disconnected

2007-01-01T01:33:00.000-06:00

What do I care.
I picked up the phone the other day and the receiver was warm despite the fact that nobody had been in the house for days and I had not touched the phone for at least as long. This puzzled me.
I have an older style phone that actually has a brass bell embedded somewhere in the hydrocarbon case. When it rings, it gives off a bright and cheery call, one that suggests all sorts of faces and names, but that, to my surprise, does nothing of the sort for so many people. What is going on here? Nowadays, most people respond to this ringing by tilting their heads to one side, then the other. This occurs without any break in their train of thought, conversation or eye contact; it seems their head movement is involuntary. This also puzzles me.
But, how am I any different? There was a time when everybody called out to one another across the fence, the lawn, the yard, the field, the pasture, and if you could hear them, you would respond with a friendly wave and a smile and some sort of card game would be in the offing, maybe a dinner invitation too. Roast beef with mashed potatoes, carrots, and onions - root crops brought up from the cellar. Glasses of fresh-squeezed milk. The wife pulls out another jar from the pantry and it is wild grape jelly from last fall, for the rolls. Fresh-baked plum pie. Hooray! Hands go up in the air. In this large kitchen, around the table, everybody talks at once. Neighbors download neighbors, children link with children, the mob is connected, interfacing, fully compatible. There is talk of crops, schooling, machines, recipes, clothing, animals, moisture, fencing, the dance at the town hall next weekend, and the plans for the barn. Overhead, a curtain of dark blue is moving across the sky. To the east are a few stars. To the west, a ribbon of orange, the afterglow of the sun. It is late. Soon, the children will be rolled up like rugs and carried outside in the direction of a narrow two story house silhouetted against the twilight. The porch light is on. Nighthawks power dive for insects.
But this is not the case anymore. I do not remember the last time my neighbor called over the yard to me and if he did, I do not think I would recognize his voice. I would probably tilt my head to one side, then to the other. What is that feeble rasp? What is this man saying. Is he asking a question or is he making a statement. Is he speaking to me or to himself. Is he friend or foe. Or is not speaking at all. That is what would go through my mind. I think the shock would force me to drop whatever it is I have in my hands and run into the house - maybe reach for the phone.
I think I know the problem. The fellow is fully integrated into modern society. Wires are strung across his forehead, into his pockets, some sort of implant is in his ear canal - both ear canals - he has two or three wallet sized items in his hands that he jabs at with his fingers, then some sort of pencil - all this and he has wrap around mirrored sunglasses. He is connected.
This has been going on for years.
Now, he doesn't realize that he has lost hearing in the 500-2000 Hz range, the range of the human voice. Shouting won't work. It isn't from damage, it's from disuse. The same can be said about his vocal chords. They have atrophied, tenuously thin, one more cough, one more sneeze, one more clearing of throat, and they snap, sending out a frail note, like the pluck of a toy guitar string, like the peep of a baby chick.
Did you say something?
Huh?
But nobody will miss a thing. Decades from now, physicians will consider the human ear and vocal chords as vestigial appendages, something to be excised for optimal health and development. A great industry will arise with thousands of surgeons around the globe performing a public service, elevating the human race to a higher plane of existence, pulling them out of the gummy primordial soup, the Neanderthal stew, synthesizing the forces of natural selection and human genius to create a human being that towers above this brutish, flabby-eared, whooping fellow he is today. This will be as common as today's visit to the dentist to remove wisdom teeth, those teeth that have pushed your smile so far forward that all of your friends have abandoned you and the circus has begun to call.
Excuse me, the phone is ringing.