Monday, August 28, 2017

Sea Monsters Out There: Revisiting a Life in Exile in the Flatlands




The train leaves Flagstaff, Arizona, in the dark, and you are in Albuquerque by mid-morning, and by the time you get through the slow-moving pass in the Southern Sangre De Cristo range, the mind is set to wandering as you enter the first of the plains, confronting the memories of several years before. By the next day you wake up in Kansas City, the early morning lights of the tall buildings seem to be the color of barbecue sauce. At 7:30 a.m. as you step off the train after more than 24 hours after Flagstaff, Arizona, on the Southwest Chief, you scribble into the notebook like Dorothy in the opposite of Oz that his does look like Kansas after all. 

Why write this? All of the keeping track. Over the years the notebooks have piled up. All of it rarely rendered into anything suitable for publishing. Poetry for me is a lot like irritable bowel syndrome: You have to take paper everywhere because you never know when you will have to go, scribbling all over the place.

But you are, and the performance is on again, with the pen-to-paper, journoizing very light to your touch, which must be more fragile than even you are willing to admit. But hey, you are the connoisseur of chaos, and this doesn't feel like disaster. This feels like a re-awakening. Got just enough caffeine and nicotine in the pre-dawn light on the Kansas City train to this point to get you to firing up the old computer and getting back to the words, the words, the words ... You have a sense that stream of consciousness isn't in style anymore. Political hacks keep it simple for the masses. You are no man for the masses ... crossing the Mississippi now.

You are a solitary figure. Things you say to strangers must seem odd to them, since you can't get much of a response. Like when you got off the train in the early morning light and said, with a bearded Mennonite man in front of you, facing his back, "Hmmm, Kansas City, must be, since everything looks like barbecue sauce." He doesn't laugh. Maybe he got scared of hearing something so odd so early in his day. Definitely not your target market, Mennonites. But he's your people, your ancestors, who worshiped lightning or some shit in colonial Pennsylvania. Someone not of this world, separate. But you feel fully in this world, and the light of rebirth is no trick. Just can't be overwhelmed by it, the rush.

The first half of the trip has been a visitation of ghosts. Triggers you did not expect. In New Mexico, as the train moved slowly through the mountains between Albuquerque and Las Vegas, New Mexico, and then northward to Raton Pass, into Colorado to Trinidad, all of the memories of the last time you had covered that ground sent me into moodiness, despair, sadness. Not sure how to explain it.

Six years before the recession had just begun and she and you were flying across the arid lands of creosotes and buttes and hobbled sorta adobe homesteads, in both directions over the course of what might have been more than a year, optimistic one way and desperate going back, finally breaking down in Las Vegas, what seemed like a quiet little hippie-fied ranching town, as J. decided she needed to be institutionalized. I remember her slumped in the seat of the moving van. We, enlisted in the U-haul Army crisscrossing America in those days of desolation and economic depression, came to a sad halt on the rolling brown plains of northwestern New Mexico, on the flatland side of the nation.

She slumped in her seat. Shapely but shaken. Almost unable to speak anymore, she muttered that she needed to go in for an immediate psych evaluation. So we pulled into Las Vegas, New Mexico, like it might be our final destination, and had her in the state mental institution there by late afternoon. I stayed in a motel, trying to keep the expenses in check as the meter ran by the day for the van, for what nest egg we had left from her mother's inheritance after she had committed suicide earlier that year, as the winds blew hard and once a sign blew off the motel signage up front and I ducked before it took my head off. Trying negotiate an escape for J., who decided she didn't like being institutionalized, while at the same time going around Las Vegas, which was in itself in the midst of a re-birth or a decline in uneven distributions, going buy on granola and sell on beef, I suppose, and me going around collecting business cards and meeting with a local radical I'd met on Facebook, who gave me an earful about the social and political battles going on there.

The liberal insurgency in the age of Obama and me going around the world, wondering where everybody went, as if my industry, journalism, had been hit by a neutron bomb, with the buildings all still there but the people vaporized.

The trip had really begun in Las Vegas, where many more than 150 years ago had crossed at a significant passage into the mountains. Then you head over the range into Raton, New Mexico and then Trinidad, and that's where we came off the mountains and began to cross the great plains sea of America like two cast-out devils falling from grace into the void.

Pretty soon, the hills turn into great big washes, big bowls on the rolling plains, containers for lakes, empty now, until it rains ... and strange colonels, retired spotters maybe, popping out from nowhere, like jack-in-the-boxes ... watching your every move ... I remembered the blocked turnoff ... might put you out about where the strange summer cloud veil was landing ... sweeping up now to meet the southern edge of the Rockies, moving in on Pueblo, Colorado Springs ... as we flew further out, nothing out there ... especially not gas ... It seemed we would never make it ... I knew ... so we had to turn the moving van, a unit in the U-Haul Army, around, on a tricky hill near a cell phone tower ... She got out of a truck, since the space was so tight, to give directions ... and out from nowhere pops another one of these retired hawk-faced men, in not so beat up green truck, obviously mystified with our presence, as he lingered like a vulture.

I had been on that road before. But she, not. I knew better. She, not. It goes forever into eastern Colorado, out to places they now say there are secret military industrial parties, MIBs, black helicopters, all swooping around ... your tax dollars at work ... and what was that mystical veil of cloud sweeping up from the southeast? ... No, nothing looked natural ... especially not that ... but hell, once you make it out for a sail into the Midwestern U.S. ... does anyone know what they are looking at anymore?

So we decided to turn right at the first opportunity we got, which sent us straight out into the great prairie of America. From that point on, the comedy had ended, and a real shit storm immediately began to get noticed ... while the watchers watched us, you, everyone, for ridiculous and dangerous reasons ...

There is no other way to put it: These are the corners of the killing fields, with this end being up, that end being down, and the compass pointing ... and we end up bouncing all over the great rolling sea of the Midwest, with sea monsters out there.

Symmetry comes to your mind, but it’s hardly late enough in the hour to consider it fully, completely. More like, it’s this: Listening to a long sad aphorism by Mark Twain, once of Hannibal, Missouri, thus misquoted: The hardest thing in life, the thing that really wears you out, the rub, as they say is having to spend most of your life trying to convince completely ignorant, stupid, ill-mannered, superstitious or otherwise plain retarded people that there’s such a thing as being smart.

Not to get too prideful on the subject. To think too much of your own education is no humble way to go on living. In fact, information can really get in the way. Too much information, poison. If you have too many beeping crickets in your head, if you haven’t gone completely Luddite (and therefore mad), then you are simply pushing the envelope on what the mind can actually contain. There are just too many things that if you did know, you’d wish you didn’t. If you are like one of those poor folks who are suckerfish for data, well, condolences, bothered brothers, sorry sisters. And if you wield it all like a sword, using the word (lowercase, though solemnly used) like a shield instead of a sword, well, we regretfully inform you that your apologies are not accepted.

On that opposite side of that coin, sometimes, yes, you just need the effing noise. Say you are resting on the journey along the mad boulevard of St. Charles, outside of Chicago … and it’s a Saturday morning and the motors are roaring in front of you, camped at the Starbucks, sucking down your caffeine, getting your first cig with coffee for the day. A glorious morning, with motors a roarin’. Down America’s snaky trail they go: The rented cars, the newly bought golden bows, all funded by the cash for cars program, making the whole roadway look like a new car lot running like blood from the old century into the new; the cattle trucks, the dump trucks, the pickups carrying horses to their polo games, the motorcycles, the morons and their motors, there they all go … in camper cans and brightly colored vehicles designed in the late 20th century and made to all look like aerodynamic Clorox bottles, the Porches for the Plutocrats, the Lincoln Continentals for the Republicans, the Democrats, seeking prestige, in their Priusi (hybrids of dinos, still, sucking the vampire blood from the earth, but only half as often), the independents in their silvery gleaming galaxies of wheels, the Redcoats in their redcoats, the Blues in their bluesmobiles, sex and death and terror and awestruck to the bottom of the gully in front of the Starbucks, down the red brick canyon, carting coal or gasoline or ethanol, corn oil and hydrogen and eternal air in the morning’s last pure light. Lawyers dressed as gangsta bikers. Gangsta bikers dressed as lawyers. All of the dogs and cats and lesbians in their convertibles, their hair glaze getting Beatled down by the sun and blazing classic rock radio, their stereos boom boxing their personal music, their power, their Powaqua, piped in by satellites now right into their husks, into their chests, and the latter, their long blonde hair flying wild in the evil, weaponized breeze … a wind, tainted by the Fox River, on this day overflowing and reeking of kerosene … Holy Ronald Reagan! … if you are downwind today it will make you dizzy …

And there you are in front of Starbucks, with your notebooks and designer coffee, your pack of smokes, American Spirits, expensive as a vote in these Chicago gangland parts, with the strange wise guy in a T-shirt staring down at you from his second-floor window right across the street, above the pizza parlor. There you are, with your pride, your conceit. O, you have so much information flowing in your head, faster, faster, faster … esters and ketones and raging hormones, from sex denied from living in the burbs for just one week, for living among the so-called (as Tom Wolfe put it), the “Masters of the Universe.” Little do you know that, even as you think all of these wonderful beautiful mind thoughts, he is plotting against you: the Dr. Cyclops, master of all the fatherlands you can currently survey.

And he won’t pick up the phone today. He, who lured you into this state of placated freedom after a full week of endless horrors. He who knows much more than he lets on, some effing one-eyed grandmaster, He! So you thought you had one grand Peter Pan fantasy in yer head … lazy post-literate you, without a so-called “pot to piss in,” as you have heard frequently during the week. Every time you heard it you looked into your Navajo-made sacred earn for your cig smoke ash. You with you shaman pretenses, your rael as blood pink sunglass lenses … He, with his plan, working against, and yet, despite his best efforts failing … because she is basic, gorgeous, a queen, true to her times as a bee in some mysterious hive, commanding the spirits of the earth, the underworlds and over worlds, her sex divine, her Joan of Arc in full arc, her animal magnetism, fully magnetized, all sharpened by the wickedly severe engine of grief.

O yeah, it’s real. The day you two arrived in this plastic castle fantasyland Dr. Cyclops was hatching his plot against this fairyland queen and long away from home Ulysses, both barely unable to even gauge which way was north or south or east or west, save for the unfamiliar sunlight and the direction of the foul winds, blown up this north by the British Petroleum-launched war to re-take America, an undeclared war that now, not even the U.S. military quite gets yet … from the moment the divide and conquer game was on as you are carefully guided into his road raging castle on the hills of the Shire. The whole neighborhood is a military base in the meadows of the Plutocracy, homes for colonels retired but still having their use, for KGB queens, but hell, they aren’t near half as dangerous to this sacred soil as the real estate mavens in their pink Cadillacs and their busy blood for time-is-money ways and means, all meeting the endless ends, the service to the great digitized seas of that false god: The caches of electronified cash, the stolen formulas for beers, the Kentucky fried generals on their furloughs, watching it all go down in deep bunkers beneath their homes … O yeah, trust this, if nothing else: It is so effing so! In God you can trust. In Ta’Iowa east to Chicago you can trust the things you wished you didn’t know.

So that all blows us back into the sea for safety, and we escape and then: We are in Winfield, Iowa and everyone seems to be staring at us. Must be the dollar store shades, since the future is so bright (here in Hades ... let us not pray), and you are in that peculiar "you are not from around here" look of yours. Especially with what may seem to the locals as an odd manner of bobbing and weaving in the bush, as well as the downright Martian vocabulary.


Winfield, in the southeastern corner of the state, is far less bombed-out, bummed-out looking than nearby Morning Sun, Iowa, but that's not saying much. The people of Winfield appear, at least on this sunny day brighter, happier, perhaps even prettier. But that's only on this day. A sunny day. A Big Little Wagon Grain machine goes by and the driver waves; because, well, he's getting stared at by you, marveling at such a large and marvelous device, because you can't get over your "am I a real boy" Tonka Trucks wonder years.

There are several cars in the front of the favorite and only restaurant, Pork's, where the food is cheap, tasty as hell, and served with an easy going smile and sense of merriment. People stroll out of the place with leftovers in styrofoam containers, big Buddha bellies, and on the way to their cars, taking up all of the parking spaces on the road out front, each and every one have one last fine thing to say to each other.

That, after nearly breaking their necks to look at you. Since you are still in that "Am I real real boy, Tonka trucks" phasey haze.

It's mid-October and the leaves are just starting to turn. Funny thing is: It was supposed to rain today.

The local historical museum, with fine bright-eyed seniors working in there, fully prepared with their centuries of knowing, to assist you in your not-so-private investigation. One lady gives you a tour. She is spry. Quite wise. Eager for this attention. She tells you, for example, that in 1907 the whole town, except for the hat shop, burned down. Another year an entire brick-made church was completely dismantled after two of the church elders had gotten into a fight fight after failing to come to an agreement over how to spend the money donations attained, one would suppose, after many Sundays of passing the plate. Stuff like that, she tells you, as you gave at the black and white photos of what this church once looked like, as well as the bombed-out, post World War II firebombing look of what the town looked like after the fire of 1907, of bleak and figures silhouetted, of dazed survivors looking around, trying to figure out, "now what," after the disaster.

Now what? Indeed.

But such worries on this sunny neo-Depression era day are replaced by your notices of the reddish Winfield Wolves "welcome" flags posted high on the utility line posts. The noon siren on top of one of these streetlight-included posts shouts to workers and residents that it's noon ... time to eat, or leave, or just hang out at Pork's ... and so on ... as a thresher rolls by, a big Jolly green giant of a monster UFO kind. The driver waves. A king of the new Martian technology that is what really amazes you about the people and technologies of the area. The leaves keep turning into reds, oranges ... fall is coming (going by?) way too fast.

Yeah, it's one fine sunny day in this place. A day to remember. With everyone nearly breaking their necks to get a look at you in your dollar store shades.

Why? Because, because, because ... because of the wonderful things you do? Hell, no!


You are just lost in the amazement of that fabled "Am I a real boy" Tonka Truck haze and you just can't even catch up to not being in Kansas anymore ...

Somehow we got through all of that, but on the road back to Arizona she came apart. The grief was just too much.

And so now the train is passing through all that, and I'm seeing things all over again. Knowing now it was real, no dream. Finally, as the Southwest Chief heads into Chicago, not even a year ago, the train stops for a few passengers in Naperville, Illinois, where I still, far as I know, have a storage space full of my life's belongings up to that point seven years ago. I want it back. I want it all back. But then again, I don't. The train just keeps moving on.


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