Zoos

Watch out for broken sidewalks, ’cause pain can drive you mad.

Two little boys on the green lawn, thrashing the manicure with sticks longer than they are in each hand, bushes, grass, swipe, swipe! Snipe, snipe!  I wonder if the topiary gives off micro smells as each blade is injured, each leaf bruised, each petal falls.  True, the dandelion puff balls they bat escape and take over elsewhere.  The wind blows through the bars of cages.

The yard is edged by concrete walkways that bounce the boy’s feet back to the grass as they play.  There must be watchful parental eyes someplace, herding them away from the vacant lots and fields where the dandelion puffs wind up until wild grasses cover them over, choke them out.  These days the G.M.O.s abound in the muddy web of farm roads.  The modified organisms are controlled by concrete for now, but they will escape one day as roots break through the walkway.

Job Hunting

I have not become Death; they didn't like my Curriculum vitae.  I wasn't even asked to an interview. Come to think of it, I didn't even apply for the job.  I have been holding out for when Nightmare retires.

Eclipse Day

There have been lots of eclipse days, comet days, earthquake days, volcanos erupting just after they find the lost world filled with dinosaurs.

Change is unending; there are those that want to keep the dams from bursting, but they burst as the ice ages end. Concrete eventually fails, humans just do not have the attention span to understand that. I imagine even the gods reach a point of senility. Enoch’s journal has probably crumbled, or people have forgotten the alphabet.

Fall, winter, spring . . . the hands travel across the face of the clock, summer bakes and the bread grows stale.

The pond awakes; the vessels sail. Some make it back, some do not.

It was one of those the-moon-was-a-ghostly-galleon nights, fortunately the clouds were just an archipelago, and the rest of the sky was lit up with the lights of an infinity of ports.  Clear sailing with not too much emotional cargo, not enough to drag the vessel of self into a maelstrom of drama: peaceful.

“It’s A Free Country.”

I was channel surfing on the Web, and came across an interview with a Trump supporter. He was asked about one of the infamous “perfect” phone calls, specifically the one requesting that they “find 11,780 votes” for him.

The ex-president’s testosterone engorged male supporter with a balding head mouthed off, “It’s a free country isn’t it? He can do what he wants.” I believe that would be called a rhetorical question. The interview segued off in another direction from there.

I have been thinking about that free country concept ever since. That line has been said with bravado for a long time, probably even by me, to rationalize all sorts of things. In my case as an excuse for phoning in sick for work. Or, just as an easy way to slip into a tavern for a beer. Bars have used that reasoning every time they open their doors, but regret it every time they say “last call” and want to clear out the drunks.

We are a nation of laws that we ourselves gave the “law makers” the ability to make. We gave them the tools to police those laws. We were taught to believe in the rules of the game. We have been instructed to not cheat at cards. Performance enhancing drugs are frowned upon. There are penalties.

So, all in all, it is not a free country. As they point out in the John Wick films, “There are rules, they separate us from the animals.”

In the “real” world, the human animal cheats all the time. When they get caught, the other human animals are supposed to enforce the rules. That is what government gets paid for. It keeps the mob from their knee jerk reaction of riding an offender out of town on a rail. Hangings need to be sponsored by the courts because it is not a free country. Once you live in a group, there are rules which when crossed have consequences, just not the penalties an individual might like.

The “find 11,780 votes” line is not looking into election fraud, it is attempting to cheat. It is election fraud, election interference. It breaks the rules, the law. It is not just kicking the ball out of the rough when nobody is looking. It is worse than cheating at golf.

For this kind of crime, there are tar and feathers, rails for riding and the rules are sanctioned by the courts. In this game of government there are rope burns. We gave up our freedom so that we could keep our crimes under the radar. When those crimes become public, there are supposed to be consequences. We agreed on that.

Freedom is an illusion that governments like to encourage. But the human animal will bite the hand that feeds them.

Road Side Shrines

I finally set up a little shrine to where I started trying to produce text for publication. Maybe it will help me get back to the roots of writing. Word-processing is wonderful and all, but it is just one of the tools of the “creative” process. I think it was in the movie Reuben, Reuben that the poet points out that his whole being rebelled against the idea of regular employment, so he took up poetry. “It certainly wasn’t regular, and it certainly couldn’t be considered employment.” At least that is the way I remember it.

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Cash Poor

Somewhere along the way, I saw a single panel cartoon with a middle-class couple hiding in their home as the paper boy knocks on the door for his collection for their subscription.  It might have been in Mad magazine.  It was a long time ago.

                I bet real wealthy people have the cash set aside for rainy days.  Stinking rich people have half a billion dollars in reserve for bonds so they can have their lawyers file an appeal.  If not, they aren’t that smart.

Myth

The myth of the golden cracker-jack toy persists.  It is just fake gold, a veneer plastic, or gold coloring mixed in the P.E.T., a little boost to sell sugar.  Plastic army men, plastic creatures, plastic tokens, it is a petroleum industry side hustle.

                I found a cool green alien-beer-stein in the plastic recycling bin.  It must have come out of Roswell or some other U.A.P. hotspot.  I stuck it on a windowsill with lots of sun.  In a year it grew brittle, crumbled to the touch.

                Give people lots of light, the real ones will last longer.

The Murder House

It is not like the property managers are going to call it that.  It is just another rental unit in a small college town.  There must be thousands from sea to shining sea.  I bet there is one in every town if there is one storyteller left.  Give them an audience and the moniker will change.

                It is easy to understand why the local university wants it gone.  This one got too much attention.  They want the memory to fade.  But it is not in the interest of the local law to tear it down yet.  They have not hung the killer.  Then everybody’s memory can start to get hazy.

                It has probably been a half a century since Ted wandered through town in his VW van, and that was in the day when the college was back across the creek behind the trees from the main road.  It was hardly any different than the rest of the community.  Now the university is advertising right up by the highway: “Education in Progress!”

                I do not know if it is necessary to go to all the expense of tearing the murder house down.  They are always complaining about not enough housing to put their growing student body into.  People will have forgotten the place in a decade.

                I can wander around town and pick out the dozens of rentals of murder and suicide spots, deaths by misadventure.  The start of spree killings, the end of spree killings, the stabbing, the swan dives off of grain elevators, the trees in the arboretum where the hanged man was.  The houses of people who had their own orchard.  The jilted lover who had access to explosives.  The obsessive lover with a gun.  The fires with somebody inside.  The high school curses that followed them out of town.  The bar tiffs that followed them across the state.  People were found floating in shallow creeks and people frozen under bridges.  The workers lost in the duct work.  The dorm room suicides, the newborn babies dropped down the garbage chute.  All the new life and the still born.

                Whether the house is standing, or they build a new one, people will forget.  Maybe that is what ghosts are for, to jog the memory.  Perhaps the ghosts are memory.

Death Is Confusing

When I was a kid, I accepted governments execution of people because that was what governments did.  When I grew up, I realized that governments killing people for the people was a bad idea.  People should have to do their own dirty work.  Now that I am old and senile, I think that “White Collar Crime” should definitely be on the government’s death penalty list.  Drug dealers should get a pass because old people need our drugs now more than ever.

Reflection

Man’s inhumanity to man is not seen when he looks in the mirror; it is invisible.  The Lawgiver spoke of the beast man as the Devil’s pawn.  The fear of the beast in the Eastern land is reflected in the West.  The sheep are dressed in men’s clothing to create stalking horses and scapegoats, all the while the fear has sailed away and left a wooden horse. But as much as they have tested Trojans, they can break.  The war to protect a city is lost if the watchman wakes not.