Carriers

CARRIERS 1 (by Phil Jenks and Neil Michael Hagerty)

A holiday came up and I don't like them. It means days off and no pay. I have to eat less. I decided to visit the Puma Mountain ruins with Fat Howard. I couldn't remember when I'd been there last, there all these amazing things in this area I never get out to because I live here. We drove until the road narrowed and curved around one of the dry tributary beds.

"There's where a pithouse was. See that crater?" Fat Howard pointed across the steering wheel. "What happened to these guys?"

We saw a group of people walking along the road as we neared the ruin site. They looked like migrant workers but maybe they had a different name for themselves. Fat Howard stopped the truck and shouted out the window: "Car break down?"

An old man with a bandanna around his neck lifted it back onto his head and came over to the window. "We're coming from the Porter ranch. We were squatting there but they drove us off," he said.

"That place has been empty for a long time," Howard conceded.

The old man explained:"The cops have been bugging me for a couple months to leave." He pointed to the others waiting politely across the road as he talked in the open sun. "I got them together last night and told them we had to go. I suggested that they should wait while I headed out to find us another place. No one liked that idea, they said: 'What if the cops come while you're gone?' So, we left everything and headed out on a death flight."

"Do you need some water?" I asked.

"No." He turned and waved to a girl wearing an extra-large tee shirt as a dress. She lifted a plastic jug above her head for us to see.

As Strand notes, “wherever I am/I am what is missing”. It found the accident in the salvation, but in so doing instantiated the limit conditions for the accident as salvation. It subjects itself, but at that moment objects lean all around it so the subject is objectification writ large. It becomes it; it put the I in it, reflexively and the go between is skin and membrane. Sure, Merleau-Ponty expressed this but through the Eye. Might it have something to say beyond the seen but within the visible? I think so. But, as soon as I do, there’s an accident waiting in the wings.

The sun was at the point where it stabs straight East and blinds the highway. I pulled my truck over to wait. In the planes of light I could see that the air in the cab was filled with dust. I rubbed my thumb and forefinger together. It felt very smooth to me. The dust was clean breath from the deterioration of the mountains around us. I added up my hours for the last two weeks, deductions; tried to plan a budget for my food and expenses. I would be missing work upcoming. I was sitting in the dark. It made me feel happy that I could have been concentrating so well as the sun set.

I was spent because of it. There it is again. Visits Bobette's confectionary she hand out Jesus gives witness and named her son Garland. He's pure genius but the Jesus thing got the best of him and in his case the ghetto didn't help either.

Runs up the hill it becomes all black lung, the new rich parts will not resent but heil our President Bastard. What thought? Morgantown's South Hills haunted by suicidal maniacal monster and Stacy she understood Axes. Took one to her sister. Two houses up, Andrea knifed her bo and told the news: "Cancer is the Living Christ Within Me"

Clipt lawn target practice, this stone, this lottery - how it happened nothing changes on White Avenue. Doggy radar a/c out across from Second Ward Elementary "Annex". We put. Are putting.
(seg)
Drunks from Gene's Place hover and one fell over. You can Witness the Spirit at Bobette's Confectionary. Lord Christ. Amen. Praises, speaks in tongues holy apostolic epistemic unhinged epidemic. Pickled Cow Tongue and Meth bags underneath the porch where garlands grow.

Blast ice running into crashing this parting in armored vehicle. Stellar stochastic radiological putted ventricle host navigator punched me to the beat with blacktop tide of sudden street. "Out of bounds" and the whole kickball incident. Drags blooded hand to class to flash before in the interest of sound effect, accomplished stitches hunched and scrapes the law for extra gaping hollow holes. pert privilege perversion put plenty pawnings into business which piece of is this that is? Interested in intersubjective larnyx cuts fiberglass flypaper soakt w/animal kingdoms and the whole Kiss card thing. Eventually, make a comic strip of your blood, put to print.

There was misery in her forced locution, a torture that I was stunned to see; the bravery in such a front was alarming. I got that taste in the back of my throat, cold beer. The taste vanished before I could place the brand.

"No one has seen this yet?" I asked. I handed the forms back to her.

"I wanted to show them to someone before I submit them," she said.

"I don't know why you would be so hurried about this. You have to fill out a ton of these over a lifetime, and you'll need to pay lawyers,- or you could get the legal guideline manuals at the county clerk," I said.

She had worked for Wilcher and Walker, the homecare specialists, for seven years but needed to apply for government help because she couldn't afford to go to the doctor. She was sitting before me, and when she bent her knee to stand the front slit in her dress fell open. She shuffled to the kitchen table and grabbed a box of matches. I could see the cuts on her shoulder now. She had fallen asleep while driving a set of oxygen tanks to Hostetler Mills. Since that day she had been exiled behind a desk in the office. It made her restless, and aggravated the pain in her joints. They wouldn't fire her because she'd earned benefits. So, they tormented her.

The first day back at work after the accident the whole office watched as she gravely dragged her crippled leg into its place under her desk. They all laughed at her, jovially.

"What the hell happened to you?" Wilcher asked.

"I was on 'Easy Street'," she replied.

"And?" Walker asked.

"It was a dead end."

She knocked a box of paperclips off the desk with her splinted hand. She bent over to reach them but her legs could not move from under her desk. Walker stepped forward but stopped when he noticed her collar was loose, allowing him a clear view of the top of her chest. She looked up and saw him staring.

"I beg your pardon," she said.

"The tables have indeed turned," Wilcher muttered as he sauntered away from the scene. "Once she had her pick of men but now that she's a cripple she has to beg for it."

As I watched her now, fumbling to strike a wooden match, I resolved to use the rest of the money in the offshore account to pay her a salary and get her some care. I could pilot the money into Mexico and drive it back across in small parts. She could work under one of the non-entity corporations we had set up. I could go back to being broke again, maybe I'd survive this if I focused on helping her. I was almost certain that she had been high the night she wrecked. And if that were true, I concluded, the odds were good that she was high on something we had produced or distributed. Even if it had been a competitor's knockoff I was still responsible for creating the original blend and for marketing it. She looked so precious as she finally lit the violet candles stacked along the wall; breathing room for me, a lucky charm.

I offered her the job, with benefits. I explained I had a charity. When I left her house the weight and the vibrations still returned to smother me. I can't dare to think how I looked to people as I sat and ate cold chicken in the restaurant where I had first mentioned to Donald that I had heard about a set of weeds that only grew in Las Jiminas. To keep the money that I had left circling around as capital I'd have to go back to driving my route again. I didn't mind the idea. It was only when I drove the truck along those rutted roads that the world fell silent again and I didn't mistake incessant noise for guilt.

Almost every other symptom had left him, but one held on – totemic. Possessed with some mute sense of hierarchy, it knew its place and held him to it. He didn’t even know it knew how to ignore him. It had no privacy beyond pure privacy itself. So much so that as soon as he sought to articulate something, nothing virtually nothing was wrong. Before the grin, there must be teeth. Was he the grin or the teeth? He became the symptom and harvested.

It was really stupid how it all began. Was it really at the come-as-your-hero party? He came as himself, his clothes stitched left and right in funny fucked up criss-crosses. A bad Frankenstein or something I thought. He had hit on me that night, I thought strange. I had shown him Animal Farm and 1984; but that wasn’t an invitation. That’s what stuck in my mind at the time, but it was meaningless. What mattered was that when he survived that motorcycle accident, he stitched up the clothes he had worn while he was laid up. Since that wreck, predictability and other than that certain type of affability, had gone out the window or down the road so to speak. He was vicious. He treated his gurl poorly.

Out of a sense of wanting to do right by her (she was a Tri Delt), I went with her on the sorority hayride. Without further adieu, I passed out at her house and in the morning he was there walking up the stairs. He says he shot someone. She went to the sorority and he and I stayed discussing the different options.

Although we didn't fight entanglement or work to avoid engaging our neighbors, those to whom we belong, it became clear that every effort and achievement we had aggressively pursued shielded us by definition and to the degree we were successful from any tempering condolence corresponding to our deterioration from those people to whom benefit flowed, outside of our immediate membership, yet to whom we appeared dangerously strange now or at best perhaps pathetic.

With our ranks now depleted by defectors or the missing it was all we could do to secret a box of implements and the last remaining bundles of Apache Ritual Medicine inside the gas tank of a shabby Toyota Four-Runner transporting to Mexico three U.S. soldiers on leave for a few days indulgence in the village of White Birds, thereby providing to us the unsatisfying grace of a clean farewell to the curse of chemical manufacturing which had plagued us, the science of the concoction itself also lost forever once Donald had betrayed his mother.

And so despite our relative safety from incarceration we were left with an insurmountable deficit in our value and place among our people for although we had not engaged our brethren throughout the passing year yet had we been translated by the many in our town who had been aware of us, or rather aware of that element of our collective identity to which we had not attended but which communicated to their deepest resentments, and left to us no recourse to application for forgiveness, sympathy or forgetfulness which we urgently hoped to beseech.

I called Doctor Perez when I returned to my motel room. He hadn't paid for, hadn't performed one single operation or test on an indigent elderly person and so I immediately attempted to retrieve some of our donated capital from him to buy myself some time now that our accounts, of goodwill and cash, had vanished.

"I don't have the money, I've been paying myself a little extra," he said. "I've been able to keep the office open later every day."

"But that money was granted to you to cover expenses and treatment to a particular sort of elderly person that couldn't pay for themselves. We made the terms clear to you."

"So-- bah, bah, bah-- you stroll in here, tell me you want to help. Let me say that it is a real help to families to keep the office open at night. A lot of these young parents work until seven. Anyway, I haven't heard from you in months. I used my own best judgment in the meantime and it was the right thing to do from a medical standpoint," the doctor said.

I got the same story from the animal hospital where we had established the free spay and neuter program. They had performed the operation two times, with one fatality. After that death, no one else would bring their animals in, not even strays. After eighteen weeks, they used the money for their Memorial Day picnic.

With the phone call panic finished I dropped the pretense and symptoms of disillusionment and remembered that it had been the universal dispassionateness of our area on which we had counted from the beginning to allow our inspiration to flow unchecked into scheme and action. Still many false anxieties remained abroad in me.

Took its task: the Nixon chip implant apparatus done implemented who sings with specialized wires and pliers for tongue and cants and trances partial focals purports to paperclip each parched face and with the dulling drowns into what was is found purchased and realigned. Nixon chips fixed on prescription lips for the therapeutic State.

Each time he taped, it was fast forward insofar as wasn't his lips but a wrinkle "tassafract" matters most Nixon pinned his hopes in coke can tracers; bar code cookies that live and remember but do so backwards so when he looks into them. It's Nixon's prediction and predilection. His election was caused by 9/11, so it's retroactive matters purports to be passive but recondite and reclusive; Nixon read his Dickinson: "I'm Nobody" said Nobody to everywhere. The agitated atoms reflexively embodied around the nothing that was not was too was not already written in horrid Laos, Cambodian slaughterhouse.

The prescription tracking mechanism satellites coded space/time locales prevents immigration and technologizes Nixon manifest which we always already carried in our vest. Once I saw him saying "hi" to Whitman, gun in hand, to theater Lincoln. When Lincoln got shot they made a museum for people to look at the Bullits and scientized it. This was located in the patent house where bodies of the war dead were tended to by Whitman. Nixon caught Whitman and haunted him secrets, hawked for undertow and the vast expanse of endless America, so the end of empires "blowback" nightwatchman state investigate the communist terror and shards of desiccated civil war.

What was it to kill that brother?

"I'm going to run in the liquor store. Wait here."--"Did you like that flick? Made the Jews look kind of greedy."--"They wanted to settle down and sell salt. Was that their first instinct, you think?"--"I don't know, it's just a drive-in movie, anyway. Forget it."-- (unintelligible)--

"What I really want to do is deal cards but right now I'm working at a shoe store."-- "I get that."-- "A simple thing for now, until I'm ready to go back to Miami."--"I appreciate you coming out here and helping me out. These fuckers don't have a clue. They think they live in a dream."--"We have to go after Fat Howard the way we did with Bill. You can't wait around. There's real money to be made"--"Does that surprise you?"--"A little bit, it does. I thought it'd be OK to come out here and get away from the people I know back home. But seeing what you have put together out here was impressive."--"Thanks."--"Are you going in?"--"In a second, there's too many people in there."--(gap)--

"Go, go. I need to drop my dues off at the motel."--"Will he be up?"--"I think so. He is worried about Donald, not sleeping much. Drive a little faster"--"(unintelligible)--

"Can't just keep this thing running along the same way. Either we change things like we talked about or someone else will."--"I know, I don't think it is any big deal. They won't resist. They'll probably be glad it is over, most of them."--"Who was that girl at The Hat Trick? Was she dancing with that old guy for real?"--"She just likes attention from them."--"You know her?"--"Sure. I can introduce."--"Here we go."--"Wait here again."--(gap)--

"No answer!? Dumbass. I said:'No one there?!' Shove it under the, I said... or you can walk all the way over to the office instead...dumb fuck."--(gap)--

"Sorry, I didn't want to just leave it on his doorstep. I gave it to the clerk."--"No, too much cash to leave on the doorstep. Where to now?"--"Let's just go back, I need to check my messages, I guess. He should have been there. We should probably get off the road for a while."

B15A is the "largest floating thing on the planet". nuf water init to feed the nile fur 80 years. bound and bloodletting. used to be four times the size. yup back whenit was bigger than Jamaica. I was smaller than a fruitfly once, now look at me, he grins. it is is. it's a verb out there, modifying movement

"a strange turn of time, suddenly went from not sleeping at all sometimes days and nights without any to arising at 7 am. what just happened? Er. a great soul. saw that i was on a panel with Zheng as well. I did not know of this! What 's the topic? Anyway. it is is. it's a verb out there, modifying movement. did you hear of the iceberg in New Zealand so large it would feed the nile for 80 years? Its name, B15A.

What's the best postcolonial novel for freshmen? Preferably from SE/Far East Asia? Thank you for sending to Ben and Jen and leslie via Er. on and over the edge. but the other over side is kingdom. placid parks replaced massive mastadons the birds can't make their way home because of B15A. Chicks die at home they hum. and so I must go there. it made sense to call it leaves of grass, because the grass grows everywhere where there is an outside. that's the anthropocentric fallacy of Foucault. No sense of World, really, just all the people in it or maybe not the people but the utterances' historical markers B15A would be the object of discourse, but never the Subject ok so there is no binary division between subject and object, got it, but that's a copout on the planet, its creatures, plants, oceans, and circulations. the sea is something for the Ship of Fools to Sail on, it's a backdrop in Madness and Civilization for the instantiation of the margin and the center but ironically, outside where there is no outside.

I'm inside where there is an inside. Inside my insides. That aside, all is 'well' or 'well....'What have we done?"--the blood inside of me could feed a thousand insects for some time, x or y. sect, denomination, cult. dont insult the cannibal. dig in. what is not bug eaten, the stars will eat with refracted silence. funny how people so cheerfully say "I'm Done!" before their time has come. life as cooking. i'm medium rare, bt my antannae are well done on one side so receptors are emplasticated for protection.

Tuesday I had to take the Mission Valle route due to a mix-up. I was unprepared, I hadn't been sleeping in my room at the motel, the room had long ago become an office and I was exposed to all callers. Still, I had to take the extra route because I could not be out of place.

Donald alone had dropped the facade. Before I left for work I tried reaching him. I could not proceed with the driving while I had the least thought of his well-being, unable as I was to falsify my mood any longer. Despite the tension created by remaining reduced to my original lifestyle, I knew how much money I could grab if I needed and the prospect of that real escape allowed me the one luxury of letting my feeling show. I knew they would be willfully overlooked because they are embarrassing to see and could be rationalized into my profession on the sound basis of drivers' fatigue and velocitization. It would be the last failing of our collapsed confederation if I held hard with the transient moods of the business calendar. If today I did not care about orders being down I would say it. I felt it was bracing and productive simply to show up and do my job correctly. I refused, in the end, to accommodate what my surroundings had become to me, by the pretense of a false organic development and in reality through a series of predetermined equations set in motion by our attempts to divest ourselves of leisure money and invest that money instead into invisible markets.

I spent all day within earshot to muttering vague enough to ignore yet I could not deny that I knew the subject. By the afternoon of every day most people along the line have built up coherent frustrations which they deliver unto me, perhaps expecting that I will carry them away since I am traveling. I occupy a special role for them in that I am familiar enough to speak to but rare enough to present a strange open audience for them to test out their latest theories derived from scraps of far-off paradoxes reduced to anecdote by a limitation of perspective that they refer to as persuasion but which resembles a gift-wrapped bomb swathed in layers of dirty but unread pages torn out of various answer books and study guides. The whole system it seems breaks down into the parts which have self-awareness (the speakers) and then those other things which move around somewhat in duplicating fashion, imitating the conventional progression of humans through a given day, but with the certain essential motivation entirely absent. The lack it is that renders them inhuman. Some feel sympathy, some not; many have very intricate and articulate corrections to recommend which could induce these objects to know why they are doing and to be set forward onto another, clearer destiny; far fewer have become educated enough by time to abandon any pursuit of taxonomy. I hear that every now and then but it requires that I myself appear to have also found my way around certain questions, and have aspired instead to fulfill the exertion of my will-- blessed as I am to have one and to be therefore by definition one of the living.

We had finally settled down to seven equal interests in which we had committed funds: the herbalist, two doctors, a veterinarian, the oxygen tank company, shoes for kids, and a local head start program that wasn't church based. One of the seven interests had now become all-consuming and a generator of return on investment which meant it required a lot of management. And because our intentions were unconditional we accidentally created a gapingly overlooked conglomerate formed around this single successful flow of funds and product-- to the great detriment of the other six concerns. This detriment mostly stemmed from the habits we had taken on in relation to the herbalist and which we had carelessly pressed onto the other projects in haste whether they required it or not. Our greatest mistake was not accepting the conversion of the industry into its present form but instead insisting that we could always view our activity with a detached ease, although if we had looked at ourselves from a distance we would have seen how gracelessly we were rampaging. We had allowed outsiders to inflict their experience upon the procedure and, in an effort to give respect to those people, we had adopted some of their methods. However, this was never meant to include responding to them in kind, competing for control of the source of their interest in us. Since we were playing with house money we never imagined that debts could be engendered which counted against our practical labors and small lives. Sadly, the effort we had put into doing the business right once it had started rolling, the effort we felt obligated to pursue so that we might retain responsibility, was now the very thing which bound us to its destruction.

"Who wants to be a damaged cowboy?" Bill asked.

"If you're looking for milk I don't drink milk. Close the fridge door," I shouted.

"Maybe desert or range--" He just stood there taunting me as the cool air seeped.

"Are you going to help me with this or just--" I was about to stand up.

"Picked apart of what once was started only to be finished again." He turned to me and started singing. He reached to his hip, for a digital music player. Nothing was happening. He lifted it to his face and frowned.



"Did you bang that thing taking it out of the cab?" I asked. "Idiot." I shook my head but I was always more interested in helping him than getting even. He probably spent a lot of money on the thing and now it wasn't working right. He decided to try a cappella.

"His Johnny Walker eyes didn’t even flinch at his own disappearance, only to reappear on stilts," Bill sang.



I could hear the music stuttering and very small through the headphones, sounded like frayed twine. Bill filled the dead air with a little dance routine. After a few clumsy leaps he fell to his knees and finished the song. The music player broke from his waistband and bounced under the fridge. Bill spread his arms wide like in "Mammy."

"Still suited for the road tho. The haunt of every 'rest area'. Here’s my favorite cabin captain. Blowjob trees and rest stop amputees." Bill stood up slowly, flexing his old knees. He felt at his waist and found nothing, although the earplug cable still dangled across his chest.

"Ok, let's get to work," he said.

"Hey, you got to try and keep a sense of humor," I said. "You've earned a little luxury." I dumped all of Donald's papers on the counter and we started to dig through them. The receipts and stubs were added up but there was nothing with any kind of chemical-looking symbols on it.

The phantom between it, the bits, their antics. Little tricks of salmon made their way and another plasm holds the riverback "ties flies". It’s an art to remark. Remarkable. Scribbled spawning saw you coming I think I am an oaf to them or jellybear. Much more could be made of the stars without promise recompense and angled anglers and wader. 2 miles into White avenue beyond the Annex curled around Marilla Park, Sienna and Burnt Fish. Everything good is in crayon. Raids didn’t help any really. Is there then apotheosis? Called them vermin I was Vern-- there was nothing so naked that the colors couldn’t cancel.

"Get specific", "the image" he said. Body doubles or tree flesh mounds stick figures and majorette ice cream. Crawl into the jaw and spoken. Jesus freaks lure snakes for Jolo Masterpieces.

Faith crasht I quickly cried scared I 304 it, hid, you were last lashed up into a bedpost and I was your ride mister. Policeman came, he came inside.

My answering machine message is too long I’m not talking to you I’m talking to this machine machine this to talking I’m flying down to see you but I have nothing to say to you I wasn’t even aware of myself or my surroundings and I didn’t care I was compuletely alone

Split the skin open and look inside split the skin and look inside and I’m sitting there parting my hair with a mirror in my hand and my cock is out like walt Disney at Hiroshima what you can dirty buy for six dollars turn off the dialer so I cannot get to you

I’m spending the night with the idea of spending the night with the idea laws were made up when it came time to kill someone so it because is the cause if I smoke pot I go to jail but I nail my son on a cross and I’m god

I lived alone for awhile in Kentucky and there was gravity pulling me down into the articles of clothing that you weren’t wearing I’m really sorry about picking up that gun and putting it in my mouth I’m really sorry about the emptiness I tried to do something with your discothèque

Remember ‘boom boom’ he was all up in your face and the thing about your face was how if pulled your arm apart and climbed through it you’d also see you “and also you” as we’d say in church spells I don’t want to cause no harm you know like I was saying it was a parlor trick at Melodie’s her daddy was half hunched on the couch when he wasn’t in her.

Listen to me good Donald and write it down if you have to-- get to Howard's and bring me those gas tanks or your buddies are going to be on my back. I don't know why you think you need to hide from me. I used to be married to your old boss and I have helped you faithfully with the cooking-- but I'm still your mother, honey, and I really need you here. Where have you been lately?

I thought that from time to time I might call and chat with you about some of the things I see around here since you moved out of the basement. Maybe it would be helpful to someone way down in the far south of the state (I say this because I know that girl you mentioned lives down there.) We have here equally large numbers of churches and meth labs so the competition is swift. Families should work together.

We were a family when you had the bottom half of the house all to yourself and Daddy was still around. He wasn't much use as sick as he was but his presence was appreciated. It helped us out so much to have you here. Once you started this investment club I was glad to putter around in the kitchen with you-- anything for you-- but since your father died and Hal moved in things haven't been the same. Did you quit driving just because of him? I didn't know he owned the firm. Or did Bill get you a better job? You never told us, dear. And after I did know Hal was your boss I only thought it would help. We didn't get all of the ambition kicked out of us, did we? I think you have shown incredibly bad judgment.

Donald, are you there? Here is a way to make it right. If you can't come send someone with the tanks. This terror is all mixed up with the immigration issue isn't it? I know you have had to bring some people over, I understand. I won't tell Hal. There was a rumor around that a notebook written in Arabic was discovered in the Mexican desert south of here. I saw a funny picture today at my lunch meeting for local businessmen. They handed out three dollar "queer reserve notes" with a picture of a guy sticking his finger up his nose on the face and the Eiffel Tower (labeled "the weasel tower") on the back. It was a bill from the: "United Nations of America." Somebody at the Slick Time Company of Valley Center whipped it up and I thought it was so clever.

Oooh, you little jerk! This is an abuse of strength by cowards, sliding these kids into the country on the wings of unemployment. You're giving too much away, Donald. You're trapped by some silly respect for the social contract and I object to everything about this "charity" nonsense on moral grounds. And I also need to object to the specifics; I mean, what is next with you? Blackmail, incompetence, lying, manipulation-- these are the methods of a weak mind. I can't accept responsibility for this and I will hold you accountable first for making sure I get my money this week.

So please, Donald, come by when you can. Don't send that girl up here again, the one with the limp. Sheila had her kids over here that time and she made them cry because she looked so strange and sick. We watched her on the porch while she squinted at the doorbell for what felt like an hour! She couldn't make out the numbers and then I saw her eyes and realized why-- she shouldn't be driving like that. Plus I think she had a hearing aid! So please Donald come up here yourself and bring me what I'm due, don't go wasting it on strangers. Goodbye, honey.

"I would ordain if I could," Donald said as he patted me down. The truck idled beside us. "I am, in the name of the invocator, ration spelld flame. Completely destroy the video and with the destruction of the video the end to the magickal!"

"That is impressive-- but how much silence can you stand? How in the world can you say that this part of the state between the rivers is not a separate country? Why do you think that there has to be somewhere to run?" He had finished searching me, so I thought it would be OK to talk.

He climbed into the cab of the truck, "I don't know why I needed to check your pockets. It just seemed like the right thing to do."

"Everyone is getting dramatic now. Could be dangerous exposure to the raw herbs. Could be an excuse for some solitude. Confused veterans in fire are welcome to stand but no need. So these things so complected, said the Kentucky to the desert. All this was was a way to help people out. I'm going to take whatever else money is due to you and I'm going to set up a scholarship at the community college. That's a threat. I don't care if you go or not-- I'm going to do it."

"Yeah, and the desert said weapon back to you. I hate school. No peawonopean invetested trees. Watch this." Donald closed the door to the truck and opened it again like a fan. He started swinging on it, draped through the open window. He was singing:

"sores albuminate whenever I was/ hefted there thawt was a-finding"

I could not start making a case. I just stared at Donald unable to speak. I wanted to sai evidence correctability. It felt like the right thing to do, at least, to make some kind in farewell. There are people north and south of here that think we all live in the same country but we do not. Every source that the people here touch to survive is mere interest on private funds, generations of ranch profits which have feasted on state and federal money really meant to help the dopes wandering through. Donald kept singing:

"contracted infested roger channels/ a charm within degrees and daisy arms"

Before there was so much open land here it was punctured by mountaintops barntilled with tobacco road humility, see theres a family portrait over heres and puts it up, tensile. Adumbrate the command with the condemnation in all that is Herculean and the I Wizards are a team of Engineers with Radiation Texts and biblical Chairs. Radiation and mining runoff are just other forms of hot sun to survive.

We're thinking in terms of socks, now, textbook updates, lunches, warm coats. There has never been any doubt that aggression is being waged upon the area. And does the belief of just a few within the country determine the legality of how they have managed things here? If a man walks into your house with a loaded gun and the hammer cocked back, that's aggression. And that's what they have done to all of us who merely live around here. It's just perverted history to claim that it is some sort of civil war. Only one side has been attacked. I took a step towards the truck, unable to speak.

Donald stopped his song and a look of recognition returned to his eyes. Without abandon he became pensive, anxious once again. "I was at a university but something shitty happened to me," He said. "Look, I’m a cutter. As she said in office light: look. I meant this. I against. I wasn’t really that good."

I was too embarrassed now to help him back out of the drastic position he had longed to embrace. He couldn't stop it just for the sake of the land around us. Purple ascension magnolia magnificence, ma and mama. Epileptimama rock binds you into angelic form. Her gurgle ascends with sixteen stolen voices on the seventeenth night with the third rail ride poking a fourth rail eye. No understanding of the thirty years before. The myth that the people here carry on, of a nice family fight between old burdened papa and some unfortunate children, is pure crap.

The decision to renew the fight has happened every year since 1959. They started to limit free movement, called it incorporation, a gesture of charity. But look at who controls it, who determines its direction-- the ranchers, loud and clear. As for the argument that it was our aggression which threatened the people's will, well, what better proof do you want of the people's will than they way our plans have come alive? When they make life difficult, the people bear it up. When we try and help them they can take what they want as they want. What better proof do you need that we aren't strangers to them? I wanted to say goodbye but he spoke it first.

"We'll always be friends like Walrus and platypus," Donald said. He put the truck into gear and sang to me:

"Infected with radiant waters small before you stopped breathing I met you for a pall."

"Goodbye," I said when the truck had gone.

Love is bulletproof. The guts born outside the body, inside the body, is the body and outside the body is everybody. Whirling bullets blast apart of me get killed when you die but he said "see that my grave is kept clean"-- cant promise that but down in the dirt little living things squirm, mourners hover over breathing downwinders, refuse turned to something alive.

We make a Golem to haunt the Stately from VX valleys, Dugway Proving Ground. Whatever sinks into it an irradiated bullet caves in on itself and refracts the radiation back no words or act, no violence can withstand the simplest act, intractable, diffused, multitudinous, penetrable inpenetrability.

As her husband berated her she pulled her hand along down from her forehead and clasped it across her eyes. A memory was playing back in her head out of phase to the current moment but soon it would cycle forward, right into synch. She pressed with her thumb, denting the soft spot off from her eye where the bone curved. She pressed close to shield the dark behind her eyelids from the encroaching volume of the memory. But the memory glided along, inside a bead of sweat, and stole its way down through the gaps where her palm would not touch her skin perfectly to seal out the noise.

Again every morning she would awake with a clear picture in her imagination and attempt with all her strength not to let it deteriorate. Realizing she had awakened was enough to start it. She had been working on jumping right out of bed despite the cold, an effort intended to race her into the morning before impositions could be acknowledged; before she could agree that what rights she had forsaken by the calm and asking passivity of ten years were justly denied her.

When her imagination gave way she attempted to engage the antagonism which confronted her so that she might be drawn out of her melancholy nostalgia for the peace she had briefly experienced. She assumed the oppressive responsibility of another's animism and cosmology. And all this simply to prepare him to go to work, packing lunch and making breakfast and presenting herself to him like an ancient tree the house had been built around which guarded all those spirits he needed to obey, placate, deceive and control.

That was the pattern of their morning confrontations, like the service of a church. Beginning with abject worship and rising to demands, continuing in the light of false respect to negotiate for special privileges, cascading into anger and bitterness in the face of unrelenting yet silent demands, collapsing into humiliation disguised as humility; the closing words of devotion were mechanical and resigned.

As soon as he left, before she had to take herself to her rehabilitation appointment, she fired up a pipe full of the medicinal weed Fat Howard had delivered last afternoon. She laughed halfway through the first drag and wasted most of its effect.

"The cure is worse than the illness, except it is also the cause so it owes me," she hacked.

No one answered her.

Oh that I could wind back time and push it passing over and under and through to limitlessness. And banish every dazed "tranquilized" hour would vanish, but then would "it" matter much after that? Is it the caves that make the days and nights more than they are, as if possessed each speaking in tongues to the other and then manifesting matter out of the void that was once pure existence? Perhaps. I think ‘can’t put a plastic gas can together’ would qualify as the signifier of the passage of modern to postmodern "man".

And I proudly wear the badge, smudges of oil and gas on a little Kenny Cole checkered suit, I’m up on the roof in it and looking over the alley at the cats, homeless, and "cats". "just fixing the drain" I announced as if this validated and translated the oil stains to hieroglyphs of capital exchange and I guess this was the case – to which the response was "Yes, we can see, a lot of water" but was it water? Every indicator would suggest this thing, gelatinous magma that snarled down the drain was anything BUT and fact of the matter was they could not see. At any rate, suddenly the voicing of it and the exchange combined with the fumes and my generalized deranged state stripped me of my sense of my trappings as being natural or real and it was as if high above I saw myself through the eyes of a rat or a rat scientist.

I can’t make up my mind as to whether I am a rodent looking at my real self as "humanity" or its inversion. At another point in time, I flopped in a flophouse with floppy disks and pharmaceutical pellets. I pointed fingers at the Governor, opposable thumbs all one! He was a Rockefella and I was in his mansion that one day or like when I dressed up as a table for Halloween and served my own head up on a platter, with eggs and bacon glued to the left and right, respectively. Age 8. I respectfully submit these statements as veritable actualizations of the fetishization of the spectacle commodity economy and me as humanware without the wherewithal to resist.

The guy used to ride bus 15 Belmont street with the sign that read I AM A LIVING RUG and he wore a tattered rug, with a hole cut out for his head to fit through and on his back and front it hung. I thought it strange but really, this was the case really it was true in the sense that I have no doubt that this person has been walked on figuratively and literally; that he lives "on the streets"-- covers them so to say, with the flesh of his body and that horrible smelling rug that everyone wishes they could just get rid of.

Dear Mrs. Rune,

I write to you today about the hex sticks you left in the lawn. They had microwave capacitors attached to them and thus, no heat sinks needed. Blasted hex hurts hours of hoer dories Telemachus took picktures of people taking pictures and turn’d it into spam springer nazi rivers thick with his story channel relatives slid severed unit 731 w/paperclip pension packages from the uncle. Underhanded head experiments like when you were all rolled up. Slut puppies, kings for a day hang out in wait for weeks, listen to you and shift slightly out of sunlight.

But you knew this, going in. That’s what gets me. That over here, we "the interpreter" and over there, hypo park juts up someone relives something listening to "Bark" says he’s a volunteer. Ok ok so admittedly, jumped around a bit, went from schism to chasm Mrs Rune’s wrinkle in the game someone burned down half the regiment with melting plastic made from Hewlett Packard, rounded, starved the other half until, well, hence, the hex sticks only these guys with slung down faces will actually half begin a conversation before doctor electric effectuates tonic/clonic convulsion

Dear Bill,

I just got back from White Mesa, herd there ws a poet up there when you walk in the moonlight something else is happening like when they let the idea of it bob up from undur water. Gasps I want to see you then down for the count. Van sent his garden and regards the nation state torn apart shorn I guess they let it up for long enough so over in the hanging tree someone inverted, his shadow got told to the door and his pardon, floors all.

Made a little hiccup with a trinket at the throat of it thick and thicketed massive mixtures of red and pomp something no one could any longer defend there was a fly before the fly fisherman said some somnolent inherent Herr, mercurial herring. Someone fed the cats mercury, unwittingly because they ate the infested fish.

O dear Bill I wasn’t a good geologian and couldn’t believe that lottery when the cats came to they were cliff leaping, what this looked like to the village every poison had a reason so they said but Donnie nature took a leap that day and came to the river’s poison floors. I got all jittery and wisht the invert shadow state Hobbesld monster stript and stripper, dead blues monster, gript and giffy with Pride prickles his needle armor or at least amor, but no, lickety-split. Done in at the start of it his silly invert played the part issuing stays of execution to enact the next idea, ownership of death.

Dear Howard,

The slide show didn’t matter to them. I could tell by the way they kept their profiles; courage boys, God fearing. Fish face hidden sweaty hotel mercury moons and tectonic Mandelbrot sweats (Mohammed saw the moon splitting) a Goyan dream of all the fuckings the Gideon has ever seen.