old unedited 'new years 2015' postscripts from a couple of aprils ago. I don't know what's going on with the font sizes in places.
//A Side
Sitting at SEATAC waiting for a taxi up to orcas and using this time to do something I'm always putting off, to go back through a little more and read the minutes, recount some of the pages. . . Some. I think it's been long enough now.
Antrocles. In 20 oh 10 maybe 11.. A nexian brother dropped a bomb on us over there in one of the stories he related about a trip he made down to peru or was it chile, to dip into some aya with our brown brethren down there in the jungle. It was an indispensible nugget of wisdom. He wrote that to live fully in time and wholly oneself one has to 'give it a year'.
From somewhere in the thick of the innermost innerds of the psychedelic unraveling one traverses like an infinitely dense maze of panic and paralysis.. Antrocles found a piece of himself, and in that piece he realized that these were his experiences, his life, blood in blood out. All of it precious to him and to himself only. But, without compare, a valuable gift he left us with. To allow time for the experiences to settle in before we go spilling the beans all over the place. That it was somehow key to his maturation into a better, healthier human being. Hold onto that catch, make sure that it is yours first before you go tipping over like a schooner like a gaff like a pitcher of beer at full mast.
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Santa Rosa
It's June. I'm doing landscaping for these kids I found through STP the previous winter... It was a surprise, how conveniently it worked out. How I came out to the coast and landed right in their area when they happened to be looking for comrades.
After a time, when you are out and about this way. There is a recurring surrealness to this revolving door of the world day night day that grows quietly like a hazy thunderhead this dizzy marquee of memories pulsing, pulverized continually to bits and segments by the weeks pouring back into and through you, and pushing outwards again the great whirlwind of those days that flick by like torn pages one after the other and another over and under until there are so many segments of memory like disconjoined twins returned and interwoven like roots clawing up out of the earth of you and all the time so that there is this garbled film of yourself forever projecting out onto the canvas of the moment all kaleidoscopic and random. No more loneliness and no more names or houses, not the how of why I managed to go drifting nor the where I ever intended to drift. All knotted together.. the two ends of the chronology nowhere discernable. It's either I am looking for something particular or trying to forget another, and all in all finding everything but and thinking of nothing else.
Someone has put me.. in this cryogenic sleep and I am this mindless dreaming thing, helpless as a prison brick and water logged with memories oozing and streaking forever struck through the eternal vacuum. In hyperspace.
That's what it's been like, though. The streets, the trains, the faces all weather beaten or full of obscene wishes and money and the absence of money.. streaking by. Believing in nothing but in the thing I am looking for or the thing I am trying to lose. Sometimes it's luck and I count my pennies and the scars in my hands and try to guess the stars and the cards and the women. Other times I believe in money, And others still my god is the wind. There were even days I prayed to my own calloused and blistered feet.
But it isn't that simple and I don't think belief was ever a good currency to keep but in ephemeral doses. Its a lot of added weight, belief. Like a can of beans. . . or a cross, right?
We can't take our idols and figurines and mirrors with us. And neither will you bring your beliefs into the grave, not your beans or stomache. Not even your eyes.
I am constantly trying to get rid of something, if not just plain losing things outright, rather than acquiring them. I am addicted to nothing...
My name is Rob and I admit I have a problem, and I want to get better! No, someone please help!! Someone please come pull me out of this cryogenic sleep, out of this womb-tomb and smack the daylights back into me!!!
Or at least that is what I used to think. It has gotten better.. the going gets good even if it takes a nightmare before it ever gets anywhere. But it's still bizarre. How one thing has led to another and another and so on... all the while chasing my tail, dreaming.
I remember seeing Dahlias face in the little avatar next to a thread she'd posted about puppies they were giving away. Her face, glowingly, bore a striking resemblance if momentarily to that of someone I'd been thinking about for months.. One other Dahlia of the "Giggles" variety.. So I clicked and I saw that it was not Giggles but saw too that she and her guy were undoubtedly people I should want to meet up with anyway, given their location. The same area I had for several months prior been looking into job contacts for besides.
The first night I met them they took me down to a place called the burnt ramen, in Richmond. A barrage of thrash / metal bands played, they introduced me to their friends, and on the drive back up the 101 I puked all over the front seat... pretty epic night all around.
Before parting ways with M and D there I have a pretty decent time, 6 weeks or so altogether. Very gracious couple of 20 somethings, at least until I wore out my welcome. And what else can you expect as a young person? All I want is to see that my basic needs are met and yet all I do is push people's buttons and explore boundaries.
20s are like a child with fire.. or a blow torch, rather... nothing stands in the way. Not the smell of your own burning flesh, nothing.
While in Santa Rosa I take a little vacation in the middle there somewhere and head up to Seattle to see old friends, and the night I leave is almost as epic as the night I arrived. They are going back to the burnt ramen to see someone and decide to take me along, on a double-mission, to drop me off at the hop north of Berkeley. So that I can catch the 9pm p/u.
I am absolutely loaded with cash from all the landscaping I'd been doing for them, and the first thing I do is buy myself a couple of 22ozs and get nice and toasted on vodka after the first cap back in the little bar they've got there -- next to the mini indoor skate park! it was like shredders den of debauchery a la tmnt.. -- and hang around for a couple of shows.
Guys, guys.. this is what happiness feels like. Guys. Fellas. It's grindcore live at the burnt ramen.. drunk but only just so, with a stack of 20s in the pocket.. and a 5 minute ride to the next train. Guys these are the interstices, the intermissions to the fabric of our pathetic reality that is otherwise straight horse shit, this death machine that drags on and on and not anywhere but deeper into the frameworks of horse shit. These moments are like little chinks in the wall of the grand whorehouse of it all.. and there you spot a passing dahriar, a stocking, a titty there a flower faced vixen scrubbing cock there. Its madness and its bliss.
So when they put me on that train it was the goodbye that I prefer to remember over the other we have a month later. And it's the ride along the bay at night that I wish that I would have made only just the once.
Really, a part of me wishes desperately that it were humanly possible to leave things as I found them the first time. The first thought is the best. There is something about the first time, the first anything.. that can never be replicated. So that in some sense at least we are all of us forever saying goodbye. One could say. Goodbye to yesterday, goodbye to now, goodbye brother goodbye, friend or lover. It's a sentiment I don't know if I will ever be able to shake. But goodbyes are not always necessarily without joy, or without fondness or celebration. It can be a good thing as much as a bad one.
Seattle
When I get to Roseville I think, iirc, the weather is fair. And warm. And, iirc, it is the ILBSE special that I catch this time... which takes me clear up to Argo yard. A pretty ride up the corridor, but pretty eventless since it is a route that I have ridden a number of times by then. . I remember a kid climbing on in K falls while I got out to stretch off the early morning chills, into the container ahead of mine. He got off 7 hours later, in Springfield.
Ships passing in the night, these are my favorite people. The ones that are as much saint as sailor and let the silence speak for us.
I don't remember what all I had planned for Seattle other than to dick around and visit a few people I hadn't seen in years, and to drink and blow the wad of 20s and study the train yards... I don't think there was anything beyond that, and mainly I had more people I wanted to say goodbye to and it was the right time to get it done.
So I arranged to meet up with two in a cafe and the next in a bar, and the next one I have to call repeatedly in order to get any kind of response at all. That one I fucked up real bad and I understood if he didn't have the heart to see me.
It's good to talk to A at first, it's been so long... but still there is nothing there, no substance.
S.. same old teddy bear this guy.. And Dopey, the faultless softy, doubled in size. We play hoops and talk about high school and about quitting drinking. I am welcome to come camping with them all later in the summer...
Joe and I, like gentlemen, extend our terms for another week and meet up again at a punk show in Chinatown. Where I get shitfaced and thrown out halfway through the show. He and his girl leave early and drive me back to my spot in Interbay. I tell them I'm going to marry this random girl at the whole foods market, and that she's never there when I walk in... And stepping out the backseat I ask them if it isn't kind of an achievement in the order of heavy fucking metal to get mobbed and thrown out of a punk show for no apparent reason. They agreed placidly and I thank Joe for the night and shut the door and that's the last I see them, in the little red thing and the rain, nonplussed.
Walking back I laugh out loud and congratulate myself for being such a giant prick. You don't get anywhere with old friends do you, but that's all alright.
The next day is so beautiful and clean and warm and I go back down to the market to get more beer for the spins and to soften the light a little.. Seattle will rain for weeks on end but when that blinding son of a bitch finally comes out, immaculate, from behind the cloud and murk it is worth all the trouble and the gloom.
Hillside of blackberries. Stirs in the breeze and stirs the imagination also. The living world around momentarily drawn to life, is illumined and finally palpable to the mind. (oh, my head) This mute sea of green fire oddly radiant that lights the white summer noon. (my glazed eyes) A dark figure drifts through without a word, hooded and almost accentuating the quiet rather than detracting from it.. somehow as dispossessed of all this harsh light as the berries and fauna a beacon to it. I recall at random the smith in Sonoma, Aurelio.. what he'd said to us about friendship and how the things gone between us are immutable, ineradicable. And that through each and every word newly spoke, eye in eye, the world is changed. Made less, made more; but forever different.
...Finally an intermodal pulls in and stops and the spell is broken. I grab my things and pick a taxi back into Argo. Ayyyyeeee!
. . . . .
While I was waiting in line at the Whole Foods, it's the one I wanted, it's the one I was hoping would be working today and I am finally close enough... to notice more than just her gorgeous backside but the mustache also. (HOW that was even possible I hadnt the slightest idea). I'll be damned, smacked down by her mustache, of all things. What lows will I sink to next.
It's a little hysterical, in hindsight, these moments of inexplicable carnal terror we go through... moments of false pretense and inevitable punch line. Barroom stories, I insist, were invented by nature when she decided to play cruel practical jokes.
Working on a pot farm east of the cascades later that summer, I'd been helping put in these big trellises. We were digging 3 feet down and tamping it back in solid. Each pole taking roughly 30 mins total to set and half of that just throwing the end in to pack it, like beating off your tremendous dick without any of the fun normally involved. Anyway, when you're digging all goddamned day with your sweat and your brains boiling out of you in the pure daylight, your mind wanders a good deal just to while the time while it boils over and a guy starts thinking about other kinds of holes and what they're used for and the different styles they come in and what kinds of things can fit in them or what can be planted in those holes or whether there was in fact ever any difference, in respect to what went into what...
"Jake", says I.
"Yessir.", replies my foreman.
"Kinda like bottoming out on some poor girl here, n'it?"
"Awefully big cunt, you got there Rob"
"Oh, god. Listen, though.. have you ever had a surprise so bad it turned yer ramrod into a fuckin prune? I mean, what's the biggest you ever seen, honest."
"...well, if I could count the surprises on my fingers, those d just be the ones I seen in frisco"
"You never cease to fuckin blow my mind, you know that?"
"I aim to please"
"Fuck. Anyway there was this time I hadn't noticed a mustache till I got up close enough to give it to her... then there was this other time, in Austin -- that's where yer from aye you gaddam queer? -- this little college thing was wearing shorts so tight I think it was to be extra sure no one would be able to rape her.. but when we both got off the bus and I turned around to go ask her name I saw that she was a gimp. One of the kinds that walk with their arm out like this..."
"Id have raped that, what the hells the matter with you?"
"I was taken off guard!"
"I think you queer, boy!"
"Then there was this guy that told me he seen the biggest pussy in his life, only it was the first one he'd ever seen.. claims it was like a meat curtain. Like fondling a couple slices of liver wurst.. how do you like that?"
"Yeah? Have I told you yet why Sailor fuckin Jerry over there calls his plant the Wizards Sleeve?..."
Jake (or Jon or Blake or Boo Radley I really can't remember this guys name) he was one of those you don't need words or proof whatsoever to know that he's full of shit when he's full of it and telling you the gods honest truth when it doesn't matter one way or the other. The jaded texan, come over here for work on craigslist, with his two motherless kids.. limping everywhere he went cause he wouldn't part with his old ariats-- one of which stood a near 45 degrees cockeyed it was so worn and rounded in the sole of it. All hat and no cowboy, I'd heard somebody say. But just as easily he was the other way around. He's the one that made me glad I hadn't any of my own. Kids.
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//B Side
On the way back down to Santa Rosa I get stuck in Roseville about a week, which tends to happen... this time it's because they oakland trains ain't stappin where they used to do.
So by the time I finally figure it out.. a week long process of elimination patrolling the yard at night or watching out bounds by Walmart... I am completely out of funds and the day I buy my last six of beer I call the skittles up and ask her when exactly they're going to be heading back down the five from Portland or wherever they went... she says it's going to be another few days but they could pick me up if I'm anywhere on the way down.
So I think why not go spange k falls and then meet them in Eugene, and I head back down to the yard and grab onto the first thing I see that's got spines on it.
Another 8-12 hours back up the tracks. Only this time it drags on because I'd neglected to stock up on water for one reason or another and I ran out of liquids completely.. 3 hours in... And it was hot.
I don't know if it's the heat or just the general funk that comes bearing down after youve spent yourself dry. The mental disposition... survival mode sets in and you can't be a pleasure loving monster anymore. Time passes differently when you are hungry. But I don't think it was only the empty pockets eating into my head, i remember that I could feel this thing crawling through me and into me and settling slowly like a stone in the bottom of my gut that won't break. I'm not satisfied... I've got away for awhile yes... I am always moving always going where I please yes... but there is something I haven't managed to get rid of, there's something binding me and I was not clear what it was.
We ground into klamath right around sunup, and I made for the west end and the library. Soon as I get to water and drink and refill and drink again, I don't care anymore what it is that I had come for, or where it is or how and I wander off into the encroaching noon, west and south of town, and sit down at a lake in a secluded area just off the drag in the shade to air my feet.
I am tired. Empty.. when this tall dude in a suit and derby appears out of nowhere and slaps a ten into my hand, passing on. And just like that I knew, right then, what I was going to do with it. . Ten bucks, I needed to do nothing and ten bucks was all I needed to do it. So I went. West with the night through the siskyou forrest.. to walk.
Beginning at the edge of town in the late noon I went as far as sundown and decided to stop over and slept in the thicket where the scenic byway shoots off north from the main. I had not bought anything before heading off from Klamath and did not have anything for any kind of supper but had eaten earlier at the mission that day and was not terribly hungry.
The following morning I start early and there appears a young couple, pulling over unbidden, the girl moving to the back seat with her two kids and they lift me a fair 3 or 4 miles, up to the keno station / market.
In the store I grab jerky, ice cream and a vita water. The cashier sees my belongings and tells me west is a long walk... and that sometimes a long walk will do you some good.
Agreeing, I stepped back out into the light to wolf down the scream cone before it melted.
I hadn't thought about rides or whether I was hitching or what in the hell kind of hiker I was making out to be, but I was aware that it was 50 miles to Ashland and the interstate. Only the prospect of distance to ratio of my giving any kind of fuck at all what that meant kind of equaled out even.. so to speak. And what a lovely feeling that was, lively and liberating with just the right touch of uncertainty to will you forward.
In the heat, moving or not, it's easy to run out of water fast and fast I did and continue on I did for some miles without it until I came to a river. There I pulled out the life straw and pulled out one of the empty bottles and my knife and cut it in half to make a cup.
I rested there at the park on the bank of the river for a short time. It was an alright spot, but not anything extraordinary and there were loads of people there, innertubing and the usual campy stuff.
That was where society ended and it was 5-7 miles on before I came to an establishment, and asked to use their spicket and filled up and drank and refilled eagerly.
Across the way was another establishment, this one a small ranch. Old and vacant. Probably not touched in decades, and I wondered what odds and ends could still be inside abandoned with it.
The next 30 miles were untouched by houses, unmarked by encounters or encampments of any kind but for one other hiker and the only other hiker I encountered the entire way. An old man headed the direction I'd come, and his beard was long and grey and the leather brimmed hat well weathered. We exchanged greetings and news of the great beyond.. that is, how far back to water. He held up his little empty container and seemed satisfied with its emptiness. "Out". He wished me happy trails and we each continued on in our respective trajectories, and for the proceeding 2 days his boot prints were all that stood between me and complete solitude... And between me and a thirst I have never felt before or since.
The wind that was so wonderful all that day, the wind that aired my face and my chest and sung in the needles of untouched hillsides and ancient ravines and treasures and marvels in the mountains and maps buried in the bosom of every man creature and plant and valley nestled in the earth or in the ether. The wind that breathes life into clay and taunts and goads.. the wind in the pine began to sound like the rushing of water, began to sound like rivers and springs and falls and tides..
Numerous times I stopped to look over the edge of some embankment or into the trees below where it seemed there might could ought to be a stream .. or maybe a gnome. Nothing but old cans of rolling rock and coors.. strewn at intervals along the shoulder. But it was the apple juice that finally did it and I swore out loud that the first thing I would be buying when I made it to Ashland or any town anywhere was going to be some apple juice.
Evening came and the sun was sinking faster into the redness in the west, but before it finally capsized softly into the sprawling and distant wilderness I heard a cow.
I stopped. Taking note of landmarks and the shape of things around I set down my things and scrambled up the hillside. I found a lone cliff face, old and out of focus like it wanted to be more sky than ground, and climbed another 30 or 40 feet to the top and looked down and around. To the north I saw cattle in a grassy clearing, maybe 500 yards out. I could see also one bull and a few stud horses too but I was going to take my chances.
Getting down to the bottom and the grass and mud, my legs feeling liable to start splintering like dead wood, I spent 10 minutes then 20 and 30 looking around and all that I found was what anyone would expect. A water hole... weeds and reeds.
I looked at the bull 20 paces off and he looked at me... save anywhere in earshot of the feller I'd have almost said it was sympathy I saw in those dull globes. I squatted down on my elbows like a frog so as to get my face in the deep end, all 6 inches of it, without stirring up any silt.. and I rounded my lips and drank. I don't know what all may or may not have been floating around in that puddle but I didn't care. Because I had never tasted water... and never known water to be described as delicious... but that is just what it was.
I made it to Ashland the following midday, just in time to grab an apple juice and confirm that my food stamps were newly filled, before catching up with my friends at the interstate.
I don't know much about Ashland but that it is situated at the foot of the Siskiyou wilderness and for that I will remember it with some fondness. Because now I can say that while there may be many kinds of loves and desires, and even those I might yet discover, there is no love like the love of water.
Yes. For damn sure, eye in eye.
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//C Side
Freight Savers Inc, Boxing, Old fuckers, Alcohol and Aya
The outdoors are good therapy... it's half the reason I've stayed homeless so long, and half the reason I've been riding freight as hard as I have. A day spent wandering through the woods or the desert or through the steel, castellated press of cities is like getting steam-rolled, gently... It's the massage and the message of organic silence that works deep into your marrow.
But winter has a way of turning that into a full on ass-beating and it becomes too much too soon. Winter has a way of turning you on yourself; you get tired. You get worn down to such a degree that you become willing to settle with less than what was promised-- what you promised yourself. So long as it means warmth.
Somehow it usually happens that I make my move, my grand exodus, the great embarking back out into the storm and the outside when it isn't yet safe to do so -- the late fall... 2009... 2012... 2013... 2014... 2016...
But in my defense it was only the third go that this old game I was carrying on with, this steadfast journey into darkness with all my certainty and resolute fire that had been keeping me so insulated and numb inside finally broke. Finally I could feel the real cold, the soul of it.. that savage bone bending brutality of it that steals into the feet and then the heart.
I had never felt the cold because I had never felt lonesome... not until the day in November of 2013.
The day that the wind blew so hard and sharply the leaves themselves everywhere seemed to die twice, so that the ones still green and hanging on must have been etched by the devil in marble. And all the commuters buried in their hoods and scarves looked to be running from something. Running with sunken brows and hollowed eyes and sallow faces.. Hurry! Hurry home to bed, or you are all going to be snuffed out like a candle at dawn.
It was also the day I'd bought my first piece of essential train riding gear: my first carrhart jacket, green and Sherpa lined. So in the beginning I was just fine, I was immune as ever and still eating fuck-all wrapped in nothing and suffering a hatred only of the numbness in my hands and mouth, but... But then down out of the big empty wretched blue jetstream of razors and oaths she dropped, like a ghost or an epilepsy, climbing down to me like my very own personal death.
I am looking up the steps for footing and there was the annihilating angel in her blue hoody and groceries in the little hands - probably skulls and souls to drop into the Lethe - I paused and she paused and all my insides crumbled and fell away and every step upward and thereafter as we passed on that stairway there felt like some strange new tattoo, on parts and places I didn't know I had. And then I was cold.. cold like a new years beggar cold in a holding cell.
That was two years prior, and only relevant here because that was the winter I decided to settle for less. To move back home to Washington and cultivate our unused land there or become a welder or student or louse it didn't matter so long as it was home and it was heat.
The new outlook that had been carved into me, that that wind had, was a lasting one where new aspirations had taken root. And so I was convinced with every passing winter that I would go there and stay there and put my feet down with conviction and finality in Yakima and grow roots of my own. That is how it seemed, and that is where I went in fall 2015 for the third or fourth or fifth time I don't know anymore, to make that all happen.
So on my way back up north from socal where I'd gone for a week to see my mom who'd just completed rehab, I caught the fabled IDATA outta Bakersfield straight up into Portland, and from Portland I had what looked like a zg3se that stopped in auburn unexpectedly... Now, I'd been wanting to do Stampede pass for literally 20 years, since I was in grade school riding the bus over the tracks everymorning. So I got off and marched out to the yard like destiny itself, elated to finally be doing this, and the next morning caught on the fly practically straight out of a dead sleep, east. It was the most beautiful shit I'd had the pleasure of riding through on a train, then or since. And I figured for a long time after it that it was a fitting exit from the lifestyle I'd been trying to put behind me. The flora all newly threshed with autumn, in golds and hazels and auburns and crimson. Vermouth abandon and vermillion...
You, you would make good pillow talk. And I wonder whether that same tumult of joke and nudge characteristic to your writing translates over into the movement of its body, the character of your action, of your flesh, not just fingers but toes eyes and nose.. does it translate. Would I find the same candor in both throats.. vermouth abandon and vermillion.
I think that it is a new life, and it is for a time. I gain weight and sign up for boxing lessons which I'd always wanted to do and which I still hope to continue when the opportunity presents itself. But I am still violently lost and spending 50-100 bucks a week on beer. I buy these massive subwoofers and a laptop and I sit faded in the back of the garage every night washing the day out with good music and plenty of booze and I stare at the wall and night after night go to bed with sweet blissful nothing in my heart. The world is lonesome but I'm warm and the work is good. My coworkers are all old dogs, and the dog himself is our mascot with his one eye and the cat is good people too with his worm-bloated belly and tail broken in several places. There's Don my boss who is instantly reminiscent of Scruffy "the janitor". There's Ron, Jeff, Steve, Hooper, Adam, Little Steve, and crazy Jeff. . . These guys are all the friends I'd wished I had. All worn out and soulless and crooked and all fucked like slave ships in Bermuda or whores in January and prolapsed assholes in the pool drain. Fucked and feelingless like me. Like family. They are the fathers I could bring myself to hate and the mothers I never needed.
I worked for that sorry sack of cocksucking cracker-jacks for six months, and with every week that got warmer and closer to spring I began feeling guiltier and more evil and cold as balls as any of them put together .. because I knew that I was about to leave them. I was already fading out from these long lost brothers, scheming in the dark to ditch them forever and ever like everything else. But I kept my mouth shut and my hell to myself like a good boy.
These old bastards, all fucked and warped by religious upbringings and the subsequent drug abuse that is ever present and like a negative of their upbringings, like a negative from a polaroid of a murder scene with all the same stars and stripes of it. Those personal torments that hung out like guts out of new-dressed swine stung and strung for the knife.... those motherfuckers were roasted charcoal roasting still over the spit, the fires of the imprisoned self, the inward crucified child.
They handed us the torch so that we could leave them to death eternal... and I know that the day will come that you too will leave me, to die bone and burden with them for good and for all time.
That is what they showed me. Moreover, showed me the ugliness of it that is neither good nor bad but simply part and parcel to the blood that pulses and the pupils that open on the sky and the sandsailing desert.
I went back to chasing the east horizons this time around, I went to the east coast to do more farming then around easter sunday, 2016.
You, you would make good pillow talk. And I wonder whether that same tumult of joke and nudge characteristic to your writing translates over into the movement of its body, the character of your action, of your flesh, not just fingers but toes eyes and nose.. does it translate. Would I find the same candor in both throats.. vermouth abandon and vermillion.
I think that it is a new life, and it is for a time. I gain weight and sign up for boxing lessons which I'd always wanted to do and which I still hope to continue when the opportunity presents itself. But I am still violently lost and spending 50-100 bucks a week on beer. I buy these massive subwoofers and a laptop and I sit faded in the back of the garage every night washing the day out with good music and plenty of booze and I stare at the wall and night after night go to bed with sweet blissful nothing in my heart. The world is lonesome but I'm warm and the work is good. My coworkers are all old dogs, and the dog himself is our mascot with his one eye and the cat is good people too with his worm-bloated belly and tail broken in several places. There's Don my boss who is instantly reminiscent of Scruffy "the janitor". There's Ron, Jeff, Steve, Hooper, Adam, Little Steve, and crazy Jeff. . . These guys are all the friends I'd wished I had. All worn out and soulless and crooked and all fucked like slave ships in Bermuda or whores in January and prolapsed assholes in the pool drain. Fucked and feelingless like me. Like family. They are the fathers I could bring myself to hate and the mothers I never needed.
I worked for that sorry sack of cocksucking cracker-jacks for six months, and with every week that got warmer and closer to spring I began feeling guiltier and more evil and cold as balls as any of them put together .. because I knew that I was about to leave them. I was already fading out from these long lost brothers, scheming in the dark to ditch them forever and ever like everything else. But I kept my mouth shut and my hell to myself like a good boy.
These old bastards, all fucked and warped by religious upbringings and the subsequent drug abuse that is ever present and like a negative of their upbringings, like a negative from a polaroid of a murder scene with all the same stars and stripes of it. Those personal torments that hung out like guts out of new-dressed swine stung and strung for the knife.... those motherfuckers were roasted charcoal roasting still over the spit, the fires of the imprisoned self, the inward crucified child.
They handed us the torch so that we could leave them to death eternal... and I know that the day will come that you too will leave me, to die bone and burden with them for good and for all time.
That is what they showed me. Moreover, showed me the ugliness of it that is neither good nor bad but simply part and parcel to the blood that pulses and the pupils that open on the sky and the sandsailing desert.
I went back to chasing the east horizons this time around, I went to the east coast to do more farming then around easter sunday, 2016.