Let it Shine

as always. You know I still care. call me, bud.

July 22, 2013

On Vacation

part one

It was then that I started to see him. Corpses of the long ago. I'd traveled all the way to B town up on the lake. It was raining that day. Heavy downpours and flooding made the roads dangerous if you just kept going. So I had to pause for a while, stop before the flood. It was an old car, stopped behind me. The guy was grizzled, looking shagged, like he'd walked all the way from Long Beach, via Mulhaulin, via The Dead Mountain Wilderness, maybe washed across Nevada with the rain. He hitchhiked all the way to Boulder with a trucker who wouldn't shut off Texas Talk Radio thinking 'thasts them therr talking about me if I ever get back to Vermon' I can maybe do laundry some place, I've never been to Indiana it was too mid country. Been all the way to Waristan, off on a day trip to Benghazi, though I never told anyone about it, took a ferry in a giant storm to Malta and almost got swamped. Got bit by a snake but it didn't do anything to me. Maybe made me think of church. I'm tired, I dare not sleep. Did I gain religion by dying? Are the fallacies of life no longer a problem now that I am dead? Can I turn the lying world right up on it's head. The trucker is seeing him. The boy seems to be mumbling. The boy is actually a 33 year old man, he's got pretty eyes, a story to tell but he isn't telling it. This one needs to be protected. This one needs to be carried home. Where are the angels when you need them? The thing is that you really have to be dead, for real, before they show themselves. He looks over at the sleeping man. He is so beautiful but ten he snarled awake, in fright, as if someone is out to get 'em.

"Where are you really going? " the teamster asks the bedraggled stanger.

"I'm on an underground quest for life writing the great "I traveled the USA novel but I forget where I live so I'm lost, ya?"

"don't be a silly little literary idiot. I read Kafka too. I kind of know what you are going through. Look it this way? You could be dead like that pour Macon Hasty, that reporter guy who was all blown up. Dead and gone. Look it, you need a ride to the end of what ever highway, whatever last exit on whichever Interstate that it is, and we can get you there, brother."

I am reading all of this off of this unkempt Vermonter, he's got the look of a cow hand who also run as a journalism school. I love this guy without even knowing him. It can't really be Macon Hasty?

There is a place that I like to go to. I always go there when I am on my vacation up to the lake. It's a place that exists between two worlds, where continents came together. There is a roadside stop in the middle of the lake. It's the part that goes from where they misspelled 'seagull' in French over to Hero, the Southern part. The stop is half way there, where the old continent was, where the new one started. These continents got pushed together in the ancient long-ago, you can read about it in a geologic history, or study about it on a geologic map. The earth then ripped apart again, hundreds of miles away, and Africa and Europe went back over there. And Vermont was left a rift valley, New York, Quebec, the Hudson Valley, the fault goes all the way through, Mica Shists marking parts especially in Philadelphia, that grand valley, too, is part of it.

South of that I don't know. I didn't study the maps that far south. I guess it's probably easy to see if you got a big map. the one I have is tattered, the colors are faded. It's got rips all over it. I'd have to pull it out of the room. It's one of those two piece maps put out by the Government: a Geologic Map of the United States. It's very colorful, almost psychedelic (what's the dealio?).

In any case I went to this place where the lake is cut by the bolder-fill. Giant query stones were hauled down from the mountains of Vermont and piled up in the lake to make the crossing. If you look at the stone just lying on the side of that part of Route 2 you can see that they are fine and could be used for lapidary. I've been down there and seen giant blocks of pure white marble. Some of it, at the bike-path from Grand Isle to Colchester, has been carved out by sculptures, notable is a giant fish carving. That's a couple of miles aays from the Sand Bar bridge (It is not a bridge).

So I'm stopped there. It's 11:20 PM. The lake is very dark. The smell of two stroke oil is there even then, ever present. Some say they love the smell of the lake. I said I did too until I realized what it really was. Some say that they love the smell of other things too. To them the stinks that come wafting out of the fester-bogs of bad governance are like the crack-smoke that they crave. They yum-it-up on the meth of poorly spent appropriations: grants to non-profits that then fund studies and hire friends, that paint lines on a road and call it a bike path, that don't even care how many people might get killed if the road is too narrow. No liability.

Unfunded pensions? No problem. They've got twenty or thirty of those so . . .t hey are expecting that even if it all caves, as it most certainly seems to be doing . . . that . . . it will all get smoothed over because they got their magic friends in the bog. Smell that crack smoke! You can get high just catching a whiff of those green inks, out gas that great smell of misappropriation to the friends of the powerful. Oh ya. all of this is merely a description of how I imagine they might think.

So I'm doing it, typing it into my Bluetooth and I've left the cell phone in the car. The connection is good enough and, besides, this little thing has a buffer of it's own. The lake is calm. The smell isn't that bad. At least the cold front has come it. It was a light show when it arrived. I should have set up my camera on the deck at the lake house but it was too late. I just collapsed on the big couch, like I always do when I come here, careful to clean away the mouse pellets if there are any. A can of alcohol spray? If you light a little flame it doesn't even really burn your hand. I know I should not do it. Like toying with the flame that comes out of a lighter. I did it once when I was tripping. I lite eternity of fire. I was Lost in New England. It was in the long ago.

So I'm writing this goo-goo crap like the stuff above, and really it is just about being here doing this. I don't really care if this is any kind of great thing, a great poetic thing, in the future times not yet conceived. What purpose fame? How much time the noise that you say, it's got a mechanical voice. I didn't know that the phone had a text speak feature. It's talking out what I'm saying sand there is someone else who had pulled into the roadside pull-off in the middle of the lake. It's that car, that other car, the one at the flooded place on the road to Jericho. I tried to get through. The police said that we should all just turn around. The man with the month old growth seemed addled, nervous when that cruiser had come up. It's him. It's him up there parked next to my Jeep. He's in a different rig now. He's listening to my stupid story (what I am typing now) as my app does the voice read. It is being read with an Irish accent. It has the voice of a attractive red head. I can tell by the look of the man, the way that his hair curls, that he could have red heads in his family too. Red heads, blonds, dark-skinned, the angel ears, that sweet little baby. He carried a candle at the midnight mass, I can tell that about him, when he was just a tow-headed boy. Rivers were cried for him when he died. That is why the last month as had so much rain: the sky is crying too.

what say ye oh milkman-popup sprite?

"got anything? I got nothing."

Breath
inhale
exhale

Best post

not posted

the winner is . . .

It is easy to waste time writing about things that I read from the Internet, like politics. But it is a lot of work to make it so that I don't feel embarrassed by it later. So, I don't post it. I think that is fair for all involved. Later, if it still matters, I can edit it. I'll post it then. Or not.