10.2
When the people set to sea, everyone can have a turn on the deck floor. The floor is more important there. The water’s like a hole, beneath. The floor is theirs, to be listened to. But when the crowds fill up out there, it’s hard to hear. There are no variations in the waves. It’s just a constant squall. There are feeling duplications falling off the line. Distance might require its own companions. There is telling how our heroine must feel, but there’s no telling how the unspecified accumulation of emotion ‘cross divers occasions on the voyage will abruptly change her mind. As well there are dramatic changes in the weather. She knew that, when there was only little left, the day would bring some more.
There’s a lot of that that comes out in the woods. Screaming interrupts the birdsong and the chatter. An airplane where there should be none sends its engines to the peat and crecian burbles seem to cease. Twigs break at random all around, when heroines are standing still. She hopes it’s only squirrels because she’s hiking in bear country. The mountain stretches up. Trees reach their expression off the trail, where she will never reach. Diseased ticks are lurking in the tall grass, blades so long they act as stems with proto-flowers on, like puffy bearings. She had to check her crotch and hair real good. The ticks’ only goal in life was to burrow their heads into her skin and lay their eggs inside her. No immunity, every living thing’s an ecosystem for another.
Complex lobes make not for good erasers, like they should. Nebraska was a let down, she did not want to admit. She’d have to start attracting new admirers, go through that whole thing again. It made her feel her insides were all tendons, all connective tissue, binding her together, with no organs of her own, merely just the vehicle for men’s connectedness to one another. It could be she had not discovered herself yet. There could be so much more — even if she left in retrospect the greater thing behind, there would be more exercise in repetition. She was trying to push her senses past the point they could relay such information. It did not go so well. Over the counter pills and balms did not give good results.
Our heroine and hero had become incorporeal in their feeling. Their inner lives were taking over. Their eye lens changed to an x-ray. Severed they were totally untethered.
The scene is a salt water marsh, alive with plants, those darn tall grasses, flowered nettles, everything most stringy and unfronded. Where the tide goes out the sand is so hard-packed it’s smooth on top, undistinguished from dried mud. Little scamper birds with long pointy bills zip across it here and there, stepping lightly as though on surface tension. Their backs are brown and there’s some beige around their bellies. Their water must have been largely free of insecticides because there were so many birds head-butting the sand that it must have been stuffed with crawly bugs. Hermit crabs were ducking from them. Wildflowers grew further up the banks, in yellows and in reds, daisy or sunflower types but with petals that were thick and tough like cactii. The wind blew in infinity symbols off the water, and the grass and flowers were encouraged first one way and then the other, as though on competing tracks. Something like a large chipmunk ran low and fast across the trail — its tail had those ragged stripes that set it off from a mere skunk, plus it was maroon, not black. It had a rounded rodent face, unrat-like, and ears that were tucked in. Its face was unmasked so it was not a raccoon — it was not that heavy either. Fresh water made one puddle on the path. It hadn’t rained for weeks but it had to come from somewhere, perhaps a stream that emptied in the sea. There were geese sitting like hens, all identical with their black heads and white necklaces, honking like Kolkata. Ducks were gliding on the watertop, and a few aggressive gulls had muscled in on one crow’s spilled fries. The crow caws went unheeded — no new ones arrived in time to keep the bounty.
Now the scene’s a redwood forest, a young one, about a hundred years old, because way up til the world wars, pieces of shit were still clear-cutting the old growth. After the precious ecosystem was annihilated, necessity made a nurtured (not born) ASPD in state government set aside perhaps a dozen acres as protected land. That didn’t stop the logging, but it slowed it down. Oxygen breathers destroying oxygen makers had to move on someplace else while they were waiting for necessities to grow. The government put down some seeds, the birds shit out some too. Drought was in the future, just a human life away, and the heat had not increased enough to stop the growing of the flora so adapted to these parts. The redwoods shot up fast, getting tall and skinny before they fill out when they’re older — if they aren’t blown over, logged, or burned in the meantime. All time is in the meantime. Dinosaur ferns, species that old, still camped out in the elevated shade. These were the several great-grandsons of the cooperating agèd entities. Redwood bark is fibrous and it’s soft. That means it can survive a forest fire — if old enough the base of the tree will burn but the rest of it will live. The fire may be hot and long enough, if wind makes it determined, to burn a deep arch in the tree base, boring a blackened entranceway enough to lie inside, be sheltered from the rain and radiation. Enough bark and wood will be unharmed that it can continue pulling water and nutrients from its roots up, way up, into its highest branches and its fragile crown. The tree can live and grow. In fact other surviving trees even at a distance can divert nutrients from their soil via interconnected roots all the way to the most damaged trees, so they may continue, if not fully heal.
On her last hike before leaving, she saw four doe on the one-lane road that led to the preserve. They were on the roadside, and as her car approached, they ran out right in front of her, across the road, and up the other side, but she had slowed down when she saw them, so there would be no fresh venison and need for a car wash. Turning a corner on the walk near tall and bristled grasses, she was startled into a defensive stance by the sudden loud fluttering of a flock of quail just taking flight, away from her and up into the branches, in likely the loudest beating of wings she’d ever hear. It had outclassed a helicopter. Also sunning itself was a thin black snake with an orange stripe down its back. When it felt the vibration of her hiking boots it slid back into the leafy green with exaggerated high-frequency S retorts. And then there’d been another large brown something of the dwelling rodent family, but she hadn’t got a good look before it had disappeared.
10.3
There was and ever will be gratuitous posing from people who wanted something from our heroine. Her default thought was “they must be like me.” So she came in tilted toward open and happy, but the needle wasn’t so far it couldn’t swing back in a microblink, shutting her down before the pose could register that it was necessary to deflect her. Lots of behavior seemed unpleasant at first until she began to understand the (inner, not scholarly) logic that governed it, generated by the mostly banal experience of that individual and gross pattern re-enactor, both.
The masses firmly know what’s real, man. Their lives go uninformed by literary books. Maybe one from the Iron Age they read as scripture, not as myth. They sure have fun with knickknacks on their shelving. They have more fun than heroes doing chivalry that only heroes will believe in. The masses know that other shelves have more books, little safes and holding boxes that are missing from their own. This bothers them for life. They make an entire culture out of their negation. They fight back with the weapons of the day.
At least half the impetus of all terrorism is to have a voice on the world stage. They’re stressed out, tired of cameras never filming them. They don’t do things to other people, they do them so the on-lookers will notice. Also most terror is counter-terror, as the Serbs had been aggrieved by Croats a hundred years before, and the Islamic variety redresses its enslavement by the corporate hegemony. Weapons makers are conglomerates, and they profit in ways that Arthur Miller could not write a play about; finally his dad character had shown some conscience from the deaths that he had caused. Today the conscience in the weapons-makers matches the conscience in the weapons-users.
We as a species do not change from lessons learned. Arms race til arms blow off.
Only when her closest friends and family were talking to her did such considerations settle in her brain, the circle-blowing picking up the trailside plastic bags and wrappers had then moved itself into another. At home now she’d been sleeping bad regardless of her beauty. Everything in bed had seemed to be disjointed. She knew what she missed and it didn’t have to come from just one guy in California.
Half the people on the street were acting headless because they were being terrified, in general, each day. There was barbed wire on the ground were none had been before, waiting to be strung. There was take, and take, and reproduce, and take. And it was over ‘ere they knew.
If their relationship did end, our hero figured they would suffocate for the time being til they wanted themselves back. She didn’t think about it, but unconsciously knew things would work without her greater input. All she had to do was go outside that day. Vagueness kept moral quandaries at bay, and kept wrong action from being deliberately at cause in her. Part, perhaps even most of her, did somehow want him still. She also had believed in love, had asked it to consume her. She was the one who never called it sex, but making love. Burgeoning love intoxicates and is not calmly scootched around. Distance then is sobering.
10.4
His best feature was his eyes, to her, his hazel eyes layered in color, so that one would stand out more depending on the light, the background, or what he was wearing. So they were changing color, which kept catching her interest in delightful scenes that might otherwise have been just been grey. His body was halfway between sickly and maigre. He was not muscular but toned from all the jogging. He was the sort driven to physically manifest his flight from problems he had gathered. He was a little obsessed with rowing nautilus, whose movements mimicked sex, but running was the flagellation of his heart. In cooperating weather he wore the nylon short-shorts and mesh sleeveless T’s of his high school track career — he was still young enough not to understand the implications of everything he did, nor how he’d be perceived. Then there’d be intervening years of suffering, where he’d have to repress his nature in the workplace, and in his neighborhood, among the fairer sex, when meeting new acquaintances in the hobby groups that would come to mark his life, and when feeling otherwise vulnerable speaking to healthcare pros in their overly lit lairs of expertise. Finally into middle age it would click and he would no longer care how other conscious driven predilections looked at him, like, he did not have to remind himself not to care, did not have to seek solace when the masses moved against him, no longer needed pick-me-ups, could leave the pep talks in the rallies, and had no need for calming medication because not one thing got him all worked up, not even women anymore.
Times came back to mind from the period in question, when he’d do something outlandish in public, drunk but not always, like dumping garbage everywhere, or speaking cruelties, and another older man would notice, get into his line of sight, and do nothing more than scowl or sigh and walk the other way. Since the police never came and no other dudes were mad enough to beat him up, he internalized these acts as his invincibility. But in middle age he realized those other men were seeing themselves in him, and remembering how dumb they used to be, and the needless trouble that they caused, and they imparted just the same that they had gotten — to get away with it. Some shot an energy of caution at him, and the cop-minded shot one of disgust (since they had not come to terms with how they were inside).
Not every sense he had was so restricted, as in his sense of smell to a canine’s. He had the ability to cast his mind into the macrosphere, which let him do what he preferred — judging people from a distance. Impending breakups really cause the worst. Funny how the science-minded cast their thoughts into the cosmos, and this makes them betrodden, while the grannies at the gossip fence are glowing in a current of cultural acceptance, in a norm. A preferable norm their ancestors established without proof. Both patterns are repeated, one is vilified by made-up stories, the other’s made-up stories are condoned.
The current leveling of the genders finds one strange expression in the social mediums — males are just as into gossip as any other group. I got a lust for likes. Our hero found a new delight in reading his friends arguing with other people, and he’d jump in and defend them if he felt them tarnishing. Web mechanisms worked his sense of justice. One of his main pleasures was in strengthening his tribe. Every time he talked trash about an opposing team, even in the wrong, he felt rewarded. But it was a tinged reward, impure with conflict. Spreading any kind of bad feeling, even in the service of good, left a malformed feeling in him. It tended to linger. Thus a tenent of the New Age is true — be nice to everyone because it’s selfish — it makes the actor feel nice too. But it evades the distasteful power game in conversation. It just gives a means of inner superiority, so important among those with no outer. By not stooping to their level, the actor presents himself as being better, both by third party observation, and most important, to himself. The only way to avoid that inherent jockeying is not to participate at all. But that slope slips down into the trap the Jains are in, where every step they take might crush the microscopic, and something had been harmed to gin the cotton they were wearing, so they had to sit there naked, and not move at all.
But the opposite was no relief. That took one in the echo chamber of conservatism, where looking round in the dim light one noticed the chamber is the London dungeon of three hundred years before. They revel in their basest instincts in there. They know they’re predators and act accordingly, with all the red-stained mane on the savannah. Which is to say, this chamber took away the blame of their cognition. Someone long before them made an economic system that promoted mediocrities, allowed the dully average to rise above the talented, as long as they were willing to express the drive to kill within them. It’s how they’ve lasted for millennia, these stunted fools who hoard the commons for themselves and ruin what is left for everybody else. Oxygen takers using oxygen to burn oxygen makers.
The ones who are born unfeeling, not just nurtured so, should be shown all the compassion we bestow Special Olympians. They deserve our care and our respect. Then maybe when they’re grown they will not latch onto conservatives and destroy us even more.
10.5
She’d drag honesty for comfort when she was inside of someone else’s doing. As she could have a good time going with just about any flow, she had no trouble getting there. Her menses were so bad they had sent her to the hospital before. The cramps doubled her over. Knots were tightened, over-tightened. They barbed the guts around for seven days. Orgasms took the pain away for longer than the moment. So the girl had to have it. The brown and copper on his scrotum was the medal for his duty, sir.
Her driver wanted meaning but she was just as content to be a passenger with someone else’s. Invariably they set her off at night by missing something basic like headlights, which made the whole thing more precarious by half. They’d go erratic on the soaken roads in midst of pouring. Only sharp rebukes would snap them out of it. Then they would resent it. Their subconscious would create a play they were more facile in. They could not return to that still sharp, memorable feel of insecurity, not if they could help it. Her drivers could divert from any rock trail back to solid ground. She could not spot the implications at that age, she could only spot the end result, and cotton.
She was not the sort to just curl up awash in her own pain, not when relief was easily obtained. Already experience was a thing to be defeated. The holes were pliable. Knots could be loosed with magic markers. Petroleum was useful as an applicator tip.
Cars are the crabshells we weren’t born with, that we need to safely navigate the world. Once the shell is made it trickles into other realms. There is no longer guessing what another guy is thinking. Cars will trap the sound inside, a silent state becomes default. Wittgenstein might’ve been able to love a world like that, with his older brother’s counsel and demonstration of the sound of one hand clapping.