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diff --git a/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/3.txt b/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/3.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..daee7f7 --- /dev/null +++ b/veryold/very old writings/sil chronicles/3.txt @@ -0,0 +1,47 @@ + + Just out of St. George the rain starts. Desert thunderstorms rolling eastward in flight of the waning sun. I came up over a rise in the highway and saw the golden enchanted light of that photographers describe so technically as: magical light. The hand of god was streaming down from the heavens just as it did two thousand years ago for anyone traveling on donkey to see. I was drifting from heaven to hell pulled insidiously by a thousand details of life and the one true simplicity that they could not longer cloud over. It was a timeless moment in which I was not the one moving at seventy five miles an hour through the Utah desert, yet I was watching it unfold before me. Time rolled out in front of the clouds and I floated in the swirling paint of sand, rock sky and air, dragged, pulled forward by thirst and held back by history. +Henry turned off the main highway not long after that and drove thirty or so miles into the small town of Moab Utah. Moab is a speck of dust of the forehead of the desert and little more than a hiccup in the road, but it suited my needs. I bought a steak, some charcoal, potatoes, eggs and beans, along with beer and cigarettes. I met some hippies headed into the campgrounds and I bummed a ride off them. I threw my stuff in the back of their beat up truck and jumped in after it, sharing the space with an overly friendly black lab. We headed back the same way I had come in with Henry, but this time turned off onto a dirt road and after a few minutes I saw a small sign that read now leaving Canyonlands National Park North. +From there the road began a thirty-mile climb up the side of the canyon wall east of Moab. The road was so windy as to limit the size of vehicle that can get up, it clung to the canyon until the top when it crested over and tore right across the desert floor to the edge of another canyon. From here it was a short drive back up to the campground which was perched like an eagles nest about five hundred yards from the edge of the first drop off. + The Utah Canyon country is like a layered cake it gently slopes off then drops five hundred feet suddenly and then tapers off again for half a mile and then drops again and so on all the way down to the invisible bottom. Somewhere far below and ahead of where I stood was the confluence of the green and Colorado rivers, the hands that gave the canyons this signature over the geological eons. Eons which saw the passage of many different types of men with many different beliefs. Silence has reigned king for far longer than the transitory mind of man could even wrap itself around. + I came here because I knew it was here. No other reason than that, I knew it was here and I needed to see it again + I walked in on a party in progress and had to once again face the harsh realities that happen when you have to go in public. There were conversations and the swirling sound of introductions around me but I didn’t catch any names there was Dean and There was Betty of that much I was certain and for the time being that was the only problem I was occupied with, but then I noticed that they were all staring at me. How long had I been sitting there silently? Was their suspisian arroused? What sort of madness was really at work here? Was this the twitching of a depraved mind torn up by pills that felt like horse tranquilizer dosages or was this simply where I say my name? I took a quick scan of their faces and gambled. + “Oh, um I’m Sil….” Back to the comforts of silence. But no I had gauged it right with the paranoia there was Dean looking at me like a shrink bearing down on a stubborn patient intent on finding the source of his madness. + I started laughing. I just couldn’t hold up any longer I looked at the unknown eyes blinking in confusion and then say Betty’s face starting to light up with understanding. + “So what did you find?” They were on to me. Damn. + “What oh it’s just been a long day never hitchhiked before you know…” + “Uh huh. So what did you bring us?” Damn. Damn! Bearing down like hawk eyeing its prey, this wasn’t fair they didn’t understand where I was, what sort of strange hell I was in, the air felt like pressure bearing down into me crushing me with gravity. Ought to unload on them get them out here and see what to make of them. I gave three pills each to Dean and Betty and two each for the other two girls whose names I finally caught as Sabrina and Natalie. But I was not terribly interested in them for the time being. Dean and Betty told me about the drive; the ticket Dean had almost gotten just before the mountains and the crazy old woman in the trailer at the gas station that stopped at in some mountain town whose name no one knows anyway. I listen half-heartedly; I knew there was no hope for retaining anything of substance, but I caught enough so that I would be able to piece it together later in a more comprehensive state of mind. I watched the pills sweep up on them and the stories slowed and drifted off into silence without ever being resumed. The other two girls were silent the whole time, looking for all appearances like they were bored out of their thick dizzy skulls, doubtless they had already had to sit through these escapades earlier. +Dean and betty registered themselves in the hotel of silence and the room took on the uneasy air that rooms get when strangers must share silence. About forty five minutes into the experience the girls looked on the verge of cracking up, silence is not something that many people can endure for too long, there isn’t a lot of time for rehearsal in this world. Something is always taking place some commotion from the street, the television, the radio, families, neighbors, noise always noise with which to occupy the mind, but it this room there was nothing, only the occasional gutteral creaks of leather when someone shifted in their seat emmiting a sound a bit like a fart. Betty broke the leaden air with an “excuse you,” after one of those noises and this gave Sabrina the opportunity to speak, a go ahead signal from us… yes? She had decided she had to get home. I knew that was not a good idea; I thought about mentioning the true force of what the pills were about to do. I thought of mentioning that from my rudimentary medical knowledge I had discerned from the bottle (and a couple of others which I recognized as used in the treatment of epilepsy), was that the woman had seizures and that this pill was designed to shut down the brain when she felt one coming on. (I knew it would payoff to read Grey's Anatomy). I thought of all this and I wanted to explain it all but I couldn’t get it out right away and then she was gone. Natalie leaned back in the door and sneered some comment to Betty about her having some interesting friends and then disappeared like a cockroach scurrying from the light. + “Who is that woman?” I asked to the now silent room. + Betty started laughing and rolled forward holding her face in her hands, “I don’t know, I just don’t know….” + Dean filled in the blanks in her story by explaining that they were other friends of Mark’s and that he was at work for the rest of the night. I looked at them and thought of trying to tell them about what I had done, but I knew that they would pass out on me before I got to the good stuff and likely would never believe it anyway. Its good to have skeptical friends; it keeps you honest there is an understanding that before belief must come scrutiny with out scrutiny you tend to forget what it was you were doing in the first place. Did anything really happen at all? With the right combination of skeptics and hallucinogens you could probably solve all the worlds problem in about half a day, but we tend to believe that such people are raving paranoid lunatics that Ronald Reagan let out of the loony bins when he cut public funding for the mentally ill. It’s a fine line a very fine line. + They dove into coma-like state like the champion drug abusers that they were. Some people do drugs and then attempt to maintain their cool and act as if they were sober. These people are deeply confused and must wrestle their way through the most horrid of nightmares when they sleep at night. When I take drugs and I will say the same for Dean and Betty I like float out of my body and am not really too much concerned anymore with what anyone might think of me for it. This is the bridge that the politics of drugs can never hope to bridge. Yes the drug user tends to be apathetic and not a good little godling of Consumption because he is too fucked up to care about such things. But from the drug users point of view the same is equally true about the lawmaker or drug war soldier; they are so fucked up on a drug called power that they must step into the life of everyone and ram their beliefs down my throat with plunger like a redcoat loading a cannon a few hundred years ago. It creates a catch twenty two for both parties and the end result will always be one side saying good and the other saying bad and the thing in question could be as important as freedom of choice or as sing-song as potato and potaato. Good potato bad potato still you have a potato. Have a potato backed/have one sliced and fried/have a potato for breakfast/have one for lunch/ eat your goddamn potato or blow your fucking head off and send your corpse to a necrophiliac convention at the hotel Dumont in downtown Chicago…. + I was sore from lying in the truck all day and couldn’t sit still. After they passed out I went and took a shower and changed clothes. I tried stretching my joints for a while in the living room but it didn’t help and I headed out for a walk with the vague hope that I might find something to do I got back to the house after about two hours of wandering, it was just getting a real good pine pitch black somewhere, but in this neighborhood there was only a caustic glow of flood lamps through on asphalt. Dean and Betty were just getting up and getting handle on things when I got back. The original plan had been to go out with mark and the two girls when he got off but that evaporated in the face of pills. I ended up sleeping in a walk-in closet off the bedroom where Dean had been staying. It was a peaceful sleep, a quiet prelude to chaos. + + The silence of sleep was stolen from me at about ten the next morning by a raging warthog of a woman that I had paid not attention to the night before. It was Natalie making the racket as I discovered descending the stairs. Dean was up sitting at the kitchen table with a haggard look on his face that made me glad I had taken the pills earlier and was now free of their effects. I felt bright and triumphant, I was in a celebratory mood. I scavenged about for the makings of coffee and finding some I set about brewing up a pot. + “Those pills were like a sledgehammer…” + “Ya I know, but I had to ride all the way over the Rockies in the back of a pickup with three people’s camping gear and it was driving me nuts so I went a head and took em. Next thing I knew I was in boulder; I stole the pills and ran off to trade some hippies that’s how I got here.” + Dean listened with a cocked head as if to suggest that he was not actually going to buy any such story, but it was the only one I had to sell at the moment, so he accepted it. We were fierce creatures to behold, Dean and I, if yus happened to run across us before noon it was very likely that you were not going to get in on our good side. For one thing I see no need to exist before noon, nothing of any significance ever happens in the morning and generally speaking I don’t go to bed until after the sun has risen anyway. I like my eggs scrambles with loads of bacon on the side and some sort of bread-like substance slathered in butter, but most of all I like it served right when I get up —around one or two. + “So whats mark like?” Dean shrugged and that was all the answer I needed it said he was an alright guy, he had his head in the right place but rarely had to use it, it said he was a johnson and wouldn’t interfere in your life unless you asked him too Johnsons are a rare breed and one of the best things about them is that you don’t have to know them personally to know them above and beyond the personal, they are folks who can communicate more in silence than most can with a half hour deluge of verbose discriptions and life-long histories. + He’s Betty’s friend you know? I’m just a spectator… I mean he’s a nice guy, but I figure its very likely I will never see him again so why bother getting to know him? He seems to feel the same way. Besides he worked all day yesterday and I passed out before he even got home last night so… ya well there you go.” + “Yes there you go…” We both drifted off into private universes of thought, staring blankly at the coffeemakers monotonous and pathetically slow drip. I was thinking about Johnson’s, wandering if my definitions were the same as William Burroughs from whom Dean and I has stole the term. It was a colloquialism and if you recycle language from the past those in the present have no idea what you are talking about, which is a good thing is you constantly find yourself surrounded by strangers with only one or two people who really know you. It was a silent mysterious language that Dean and I shared; we had spent enough idle evenings doing nothing and mixd them with enough ferrocious adventures to know each others thought as well as our own. Not that we tended to have the same thoughts which a lot of people who came int contact with us assumed. Actually Dean and I disagreed on just about everything, but we were both able to see things from the others point of view without having to constantly prove ourselves right. He believed what he believed and I had my beliefs and we may have shared and compared, contrasted and built upon each others thoughts, but in no way were we the same. + I was turning this around in the feeble gray cells trying to wakethem up when I heard Dean groan. + “Fuck she’s back…” + “Who?” + “Natalie.” + “Who’s Natalie?” + “The beast.” + It was then that the beastial creature ricketed into thekitchen like a teetering wounded warthog. Of course I only see it that way in hindsight at the time there was merely a deep sense of spiritual torture rising up in me, I immediately took her to be the source of the foul locus plague character that fell upon the kitchen with her precense. Looking back I see only a warthog, there is no other word for her; she was one of those unique people that is ugly inside out and through and through. +Just as there are those people that upon meeting I am immediately sure I will be friends with forever, so to are there those people whose immpression of death is so strong that I know I will go to my grave living in fear of there existance. Not a fear of them per se, but a fear of there personality, that some twist of fate might turn me into a Natalie. She was one of those people whom nature itself must have been ashamed of, to have created such a vacumm of life and to allow it to continue to spread like a pestulence over the land, it makes the argument against a centient god stronger with every passing day. + Natalie was about thirty pounds over weight making her inhabit that no mans land between big boned and good old fashioned fat; it was a land in which wayward creatures that should have been beautiful find them selves, dragged by an unpleasant personality to the doldrums of food. Nobody really like Natalie as I was to learn from Mark, he detested her but was so amused by her that he never protested anything she did. The woman was like a bulldozer mooing down everything in its path. + The first words out of her mouth were “who the fuck are you?” + There is no space for kindness in the heart of the grotesque they can not afford it; so great is their silent grudge against the world they must constantly reassure themselves that they are on absolute edge, guarded on all sides against a possible attack, an attack which would devastated whatever is left of there chopped liver looking egos. It is a defense mechanism of a wounded animal to start every interaction with a hostile tone, the milk of human kindness flows only from the udders of self love without that it ferments into hatred and manifests itself through out the body in ugliness and hostility. + “I am Sil.” Simplicity is always the best bet in the face of inbred opposition. + “You must be the third one, I think we met last night but you look kind of forgettable, I must have overlooked you” + “Yes you must have.” I’ve always been curious what it is that makes one like Natalie, perhaps it was her parents, perhaps cruel classmates, perhaps its hardwired genetically, but whatever the sourse may be it is never the ones they take it out on. We the innocent always bear the brunt of the assault against the guilty. + “Well how about some coffee?” It was the demanding tone that got to me, as if I were too assumed that I would have no chance of understanding the clever insults that she dropped like smelly little turds leaking out her loose and defective sphincter, if nothing else you could probably follow their trail through the forest and find her if she ever got lost. Except that I doubt very much anyone would look for herif she did get lost. + “The coffee is not ready yet.” + “Well what good are you?” + “None to you” + It was early in the morning I hadn’t had anything to drink yet and I was not about to match wits with something that I hoped would just go away. I love a cutting sarcastic argument because I usually win them, but I didn’t have the energy for it this morning and I figured that it was not worth one iota of stress to put this woman in her place. Besides it was not my house, not my coffee, not my friend, and not my responsibility to make everyone into a nice person. I had a responsibility to myself; I looked at Dean for a minute as if to say what is this thing?, I looked at hr as she tunneled about in the refridgerator seeking refuge. + “I tell you what, you make me kind of queasy and I think coffee on top of that would be a bad idea so why don’t you help yourself to the whole damn pot and I will leave you in peace to enjoy your heartfelt superiorty over the world and wonder why it is that I don’t like you even though I don’t know you… try thinking about…. No, actually I think you should just keep it simple this morning… just trying thinking or better yet try feeling.” + I was out the door before I even finished and Dean was right behind me. We hopped in the trusty toyota and headed off in search of a more serene cup of coffee. We found what we were looking for at circle K on the corner where the clerk did not feel it necessary to ridicule us while we filled our cups which was really all you can ask for in this world.. |