Postcard from Warbler Park

Pieta (with Blue Marlin)

Freedom

Aluminum Eldorado w/ Practical Tactile Christ

Wherefore Art Tao

Accidents Will Happen

Kooka w/ Wireless Remote-Controlled Hexacontatetragon Yo-Yo

Ray and Faye

America

Nothing Is Ever What It Is

1/2 of Abraham Lincoln

Mule and Architecture

Another Tom, Another Place

Madonna with Yellow Jacket

Synaptic Frost and Fire

This is Not a Blue-Ribbon Black Angus Hovering Above a Field of Poppies

Duck and Globe

Satan Claus

Links

Rest Area

So we're flying down the interstate in Cheryl's beat up '72 Vista Cruiser. She's driving bare foot singing "Rebel Yell" with the radio. It's already 95 degrees at 6:45 am and I'm sifting through a box of stale Lucky Charms for yellow marshmallow moons to wash down with this warm Crown Royal, lately become my Breakfast of Champions!

Already I'm sweating bullets and getting vibes things could easily go sideways any moment.

I note the fucking .38 is still between us on the front seat and that this is probably a bad idea. I think, man, this is totally irresponsible! And I wonder what my dead mother would think.

So I try putting the thing in the glove compartment, but the door's jammed. Obviously.

I look over at Cheryl like maybe she should take some responsibility, for something, for once in her jammed-up forever pubescence; and maybe that, you know, if I slung a fistful of these marshmallow blue diamonds at her face she might consider listening to what the hell ever it was I'm trying to say. But I also knew if I did that, she'd just slam on the brakes and try to push me out of her car again. So I did that, to make sure; and she did that, just as I had prophesied.

Last night's a worse blur. And now fumes from the leaky manifold mingle with her fresh yeast infection, the unanticipated combination of which produces a sudden physical fluctuation of undulating waves of intense existential anxiety rippling (around 110 cycles per second) straight to the core of my being thereupon becoming an extremely unwelcome contribution to my usual reluctance for morning reflections upon the imminence of my own mortality.

So we look out over that field of fresh yellow corn on the right & wonder what it would be like to shoot our soul across it like a ten-cent Bottle Rocket. Or maybe into that jet overhead. So we do the math.

But the sun hits my eyes and I'm suddenly reminded that everyone I ever thought I knew (which I never did) eventually become ghosts, angels, devils, monstrous assholes or simple disembodied voices now preserved forever in the amber of memory. And I've no doubt I've become some configuration or another thereof, to them. I think maybe we all die many times before we die to be eventually resurrected from the dead as semi-divine daemons or (if we're lucky) those wispy incidental spirits sometimes fluttering by on the periphery of mind like Barn Swallows in twilight. Everyone in the world I've ever met I eventually develop the desire to get the hell away from, sometimes forever. Note to self: and so you've succeeded brilliantly.

So we crank down the windows and study the breeze for fresh metaphysical possibilities, all the while once again engaged in the interminable post-mod dialogue with the same old nostalgia for pasts that never happened.

Thankfully, Cheryl leans in and begins to brief me on the next phase of our tri-state-murder-spree-thingy. I'm chewing yellow moons. Take a couple of swigs. Pretend again. Study the breeze.

Apparently she's inclined to "blow the heads off the fucking Irish Setters" who belong to our target suburbanites. I respond, "but they're twins!" She says she's also been "toying" with the idea of "nailing their children's hands and feet to the kitchen floor in 'X' patterns". For a moment... that lasted way too long, I contemplated the logistics of these repugnant propositions. "And perhaps as an encore," I proposed, "sticking #2 pencils into the necks of their parakeets." A genuinely repulsive suggestion, of course, but ultimately an important artistic touch to the general carnage and unspeakable horror that formed the core of our allied operations.

Suddenly Cheryl hits a pot hole, the door of the glove compartment flies open, and a brand new edition of the Gideon's Bible falls at my feet. My very first heretical thought ought to have at least elicited the proper response similar to that of being cerebral-Ly penetrated by thin, white-hot sheets of sheet metal. Because I'm probably evil.

Suddenly, I notice an infinite row of Orange Traffic Cones directly ahead, and reach in the back seat for my dad's deer rifle. I make a notch on the stock for every kill, just like the old man did when he shot those deformed puppies in our yard.

On our last run through Arizona, for example, I hit 13 orange traffic cones, 2 iron deer, 6 pink flamingos ( Phoenicopterus ruper plasticus), 1 concrete Jesus, and numerous other mass-production lawn ornaments people stick in their yards hoping to impress somedamnbody with their avant-gardener aesthetic sensibilities.

I even shot up that fucking big-headed Burger Boy (the fat guy in red & white checkered overalls holding a giant cheeseburger in the air in a quasi-Nazi style, btw, all over the place). He's got about ten different names, this slick son of a bitch. Two or three states over he may go by the name "Bob," or "Rick," or "Billy." So most likely he's an ex-felon. I always call him "Big Boy," because that's what it says on his fucking shirt. I usually shoot his hair. So it kinda makes sense.

He may think he's about to take over the whole goddamn country with his "Bottomless Breakfast Bar" bullshittery, Communist or not, but that's where Dad's old deer rifle comes out to play, Big Boy!

Listen. Any 12 ft. tall roadside cultural icon resembling a scandalous T.V. evangelist, or fucking Elvis Presley (as a bloated, pill-popping pseudo-astrologer hawking greasy-ass hamburgers) has some contention coming, just for being a thing-in-this-world. So that's why I shoot him dead in his damn hair.

Some people may think I've had a breakdown, and opened up an Origami Kite shop in Crazy Town only to burn it down. The other night for example Cheryl, me, Jason and whats-her-name) totally trashed a 4-star hotel room in Pensacola. First, we threw all the Faux-Internationale, fake-ass furniture straightoff the 3rd floor balcony into the swimming pool 25 ft. or so below. We were bent on ushering in our independent visions of an apocalyptic dystopia. I mean, someone has to be the avant-garde of the future paradigm.

By then we'd already sloshed back three maybe four pictures of way-hot margaritas, smoked some two-hit hydro; so of course we took turns shooting anything still floating in the pool, or even near the pool, french-kissing between shots like our favorite slightly-crazed, rebellious, somewhat lovable but ultimately doomed Hollywood anti-heroes.

Listen. I know the thought of shooting randomly at inanimate objects, without prior safety-training, at 3 in the morning, whilst heavily intoxicated with drugs, alcohol and raging hormones may offend the delicate sensibilities of some.

But this is the very alchemical formula that facilitates the creation of many wonderful, beautiful and good people who emerge into this world; viz., music provides the rhapsodic soundtrack for the script; wilful defiance toward accepted moral codes or conventions of behavior provides an acceptable sensation of danger; currently available hallucinogens, prescription pills and/or any of an extensive variety of Victory Gins provide either the courage to impose, or the passivity to resist this otherwise frustrated Will-to-Power (the motive force of both parties) that strives and strains to be briefly satiated in the ecstatic climax of an incomplete loss of self that neither drugs, nor cultural prohibition, nor conflicting diagnoses, nor the imposition of any authoritarian element of any society will ever control.

I'm not one to pretend to know more about life than anybody else. I believe (beyond reason) that everyone's life experience is just as valuable or as insignificant as that of anyone else, in whatever spectrum of the space/time continuum you happen to land. Your perceptions, your insecurities are necessary for me to penetrate, exploit, protect and/or in any case correctly predict; and this is the modus operandi of both, those who love you and those who hate you. And that's why it's all relative.

Take murder. As natural, and therefore as legitimate a human behavior as any other contemporary cultural indicator by which to measure ones' humanity. Sure, having three or four beautiful, intelligent children who eventually grow up, hate you for forty years; who in turn have nine, thirteen more beautiful, intelligent children who then grow up to hate their parents; slam-dunking a basketball; breaking your ass bone on a skateboard; getting a worthless liberal arts degree in anything; falling in love with those who will destroy you; the cheering of crowds after getting your head kicked-in at a rodeo are all certainly honorable enough accomplishments for some. But I prefer tracking my natural inclinations cross-country, between 55 and 90 mph, as free and chaotic as the weather.

And so, here's the "esoteric mysteries" of life resolved:

There is no verifiable difference between human nature and Nature.

That's the big secret being kept from you by all of these highly-venerated pillars of civilization, viz., Church, State, Academia, Media. All of them liars, at the very least, by omission. These are the barkers at the big carnival; the merchants of mortal terrors and ethereal Wonderlands in whatever Kingdom they claim is to Come.

I consider myself nothing much more than just another temporal antagonist, amongst billions (like a virus) in a perpetually dynamic, perfectly Natural entropic system. Whatever you do is always serving whatever the purpose of Evolution is anyway, right? So that, whether that evolution is progressive or not, according to whatever presumption of authority you might imagine presides over it all, is by definition relative. So that, whether you're a fuck up, a super-holy somebody, a prick, a slope-headed idiot or a blue-ribbon genius makes no difference. Because each and every angel or demon encountered is the necessary conditional for the existence and maintenance of it's opposite. So never mind history. That's where everything becomes an Escher print that moves. History teaches no one anything at all because its been edited to death to meet the agendas of all manner of liars.

I can only presume this is something everyone has considered at least once in their life.

But you have to embrace (like an innocent puppy) the inherent necessity of both creation and destruction; the one perpetually, by necessity, supporting the existence of the other, in an eternal symbiotic co-dependency. The concept behind Yin and Yang, for example. There is darkness in light. There is light in darkness. That is relativity. But maybe you've never felt the intensity of Speed of Light acceleration whilst being chased by some faceless thing or another in a dream. And maybe (can we be sisters?) maybe you find it hard to acknowledge to yourself, the fact, that you've lied to everyone you can only imagine to have ever known. You probably can't appreciate the ecstatic simultaneity of horror & wonder because maybe you fear the inevitable backlash from your own spirits of contradiction (they rummage through my mind like rats with metal teeth) And maybe that's why every single fucking time you stand up and say that you are THIS or that you are THAT... everyone knows you mean just the opposite. Oh yeah. We've met before.

Me? I'm only fulfilling the prophecies of my own nightmares; where conventions of " right and wrong" have no particular authority; where there is now a glorious void of people trying to tell me what to do, how I should live my life. Those spirits who once tormented me like Shades upon the Bardo Plane, now slowly dissipating in radioactive rain.

So, De gustibus non est disputandum.

Anyway, I tell Cheryl to stop weaving so I can get a bead on these traffic cones, and just then, she nearly gets us crushed by a gasoline truck she cut off in order to make the exit ramp for a Rest Area. At 65 mph.

She says she has to "Drop the kids off".
And we'll be Right Back After These Messages!

We pull up to the Information Center and Cheryl bolts for the women's room. Meanwhile, I'm separating diamonds, moons, stars, clovers...
All of a sudden I look up and see this guy standing in the parking lot about 30 yards away, with a cloud of yellow butterflies flying around his head. He's smiling and reaches up to touch them with the look of wonder like that in the eyes of a child. So I expected a Disney-esque ending.

But then after a minute or so the butterflies begin flying into his eyes and mouth. He gets noticeably perturbed and proceeds across the parking lot to his car.
The butterflies follow.
Then the guy stops again, lingers a bit, and with an in-tact rational mind suddenly mystified by an unprecedented reality he fails to comprehend looks at himself, slowly up, slowly down, like maybe he can't remember putting on a lemon-yellow sport coat that morning. The weird thing was the more he tried to brush the butterflies off the more excited they became. I was thinking they'd apparently gone into some kind of " swarm mode" (possibly in reaction to some agitating ingredient in his cologne).

In my estimation the whole event took on an indignant quality when the guy began spinning in circles, thrashing the air like a madman. He then swats so he loses his glasses and crunches them beneath his feet on the asphalt. Having no glasses, with butterflies tearing at his eyes, he can't see far enough to even reach his car door. So what does he do? He backs directly into the path of a 1981 Winnebago coming off the exit ramp at probably 45 mph. I watched that man disappear under the front end of that R.V. so fast, it was like watching a department store mannequin sucked into a chipper truck. You could hear the tires barking on the road.

Don't Feed The Winnebagos!

Finally the Winnebago stops. Out pops a guy wearing blue Bermuda shorts and a big straw hat. He adjusts his shorts, and proceeds to the front of the vehicle to assess damages, if any. I was thinking he was probably thinking he'd hit a deer or a log.

All of a sudden people were screaming in 360 like their goddamn hair had caught fire. While Bermuda was checking out the front, a couple of old women had been checking out the back. It was probably then Bermuda realized he'd actually run over something slightly more significant than a fucking speed bump.

Anyway, Bermuda gets totally frenetic, wringing his hands like a praying mantis. I kinda felt sorry for him. I mean, here's a guy (I’m guessing) who'd probably only intended to take the wife and kids to blow his shitty tax refund at Disney World, but instead winds up running over someone's head along the way. That shit wasn't in the plan, nor on any of the complimentary maps. Shit like that usually hits you when you least expect it, and I was guessing poor Bermuda was trying to figure out what he did to piss off God.

Anyway, he suddenly, weirdly assumes a position of authority (maybe for the first time in his life), and starts running around telling other people what the fuck to do.
It was about then I considered sparing old Bermuda a minimum 20 year prison sentence for man-slaughter by blowing his head off then and there.
But I didn't love Bermuda that much.

Anyway, after the dead guy's head stopped smoking (with butterflies still attacking his lifeless body), people were running from everywhere to see what severe head trauma looks like. I admit I was curious. I can still see the JFK head shot today, clear as a bell.

Suddenly, all these kids start piling out of the Winnebago and scattering all over the place. Two of them rip around to the back of the vehicle and start vomiting what appeared to be remnants of Taco Bell. A little girl with a bright orange Popsicle pops out and skips across the parking lot towards monkey bars in the park. An older kid with a club foot lumbers out and begins to play Frisbee with the happy family Lab in the fucking parking lot. Finally, a 250+ lb. woman slowly emerges with a first-aid kit, a liter of Diet Coke, and a roll of Bounty (the "Quicker-Picker-Upper") paper towels, then proceeds to ambulate her immediate trajectory with no clear direction, and with the finesse of a large land animal fighting off narcotics from a dart gun.

I take a another swig.

Thank God Cheryl returns from the women's room and asks what all the commotion's about, which snapped me back to somewhere I remembered was only recently real. I said that, while she had been "pinching a loaf," the entire Rest Area had fallen headlong through a rip in the fabric of the universe no doubt leading into some hitherto undetermined order of magnitude, the precise space/time configuration of which, though vague, may conceivably exist in a state of infinite regress."

I told her it was Hell for some of us, and of passing interest to a few. Later, I told her what had really happened.

She never flinched. A true soldier. She knows that I was, am and in all likelihood will always be just another temporal spirit slowly dissipating beneath the waves of her watery subterranean world. She starts the car, pops in a fresh grape-flavored jaw-breaker, turns towards the Interstate ON ramp (which might just as well have been an EXIT ramp), and whilst gobbling her hard candy says,
"Wahwa wahhwa mawawama ma waba mamambawama mahma ba mah wah."