The Climb

We eventually dug our way out of the tunnel. It was bound to happen sooner or later. If we worked hard enough, we were bound to be successful. We had talked about it long enough. We had dreamt about it for so many nights that were like days, and we had sung about quietly during the days that were dark.
One night we clawed through all the muddled dreams, through the bright geometric nightmares, through unspeakably complex puzzles all made of dirt and branches and dust. And we did it with our own hands and we did it with our own voices and with our newfound language which easily disturbed and broke apart the thick walls of our established identities that had turned into heavy pieces of rock.

I could feel the heavy force of gravity the entire time – pulling us down, down, down. I saw old symbols carved into the walls as we passed by and kept on moving and many times I slipped on the outstretched forms of a few equations and algorithms for which I had no understanding or explanation.

Something may have helped us along the way, something that sometimes pulled us up, something leading us along through barely visible silver threads. But it had no name and it had no voice so we would never speak of it and we couldn’t have said anything about it even if we wanted to speak. We would never acknowledge its presence even among ourselves.

Our improvised songs travelled out ahead of us like guides, then came back as echoes and told us of the future. We wouldn’t let any force stop us. Not fear, not hunger, not exhaustion. Nothing would pull us back, we wouldn’t let anything pull us back down. Sometimes when I looked ahead I saw the same nothing staring back at me, nothing behind, nothing ahead, nothing below us, nothing above. But I kept on digging, and I kept on singing and I kept on speaking.

I awoke on the other side, naked and red with blood and bruises, encircled by cold and darkness. Bubbles clung to my skin, and the past dissolved behind us in a black puddle.

We all walked away in different directions then and I never saw any of them again. I never even tried to search for them. When I think of them now, they have no faces and they have no names. I am not even sure that they ever existed at all.

Rise of the Old King

When the new sun was born the impulse to kiss his remorseless, deathless face had to be held at bay. Slumbering peacefully, the lightest touch would rouse him, incurring the violence we feared and longed for. In our shinning world of straight edges, mirrored glass, blue screens and open source, it was easy to lose track of the other thing, that which lurked in the places we had avoided for so long, the real animal brutality of our own deepest subconsciousness. Emerging from the depths, and not from the skies where we raised our dream machines towards the stars, the old King returned to us from the realms of myth and shadow.

He came from the caves, from the hollow center of our world, a kingdom we had forgotten in our infancy as a race. Somewhere through the ages, in our race for distant suns, we ceased to look down at our own root. The memory of the inner Kingdom faded as the last pages of the world’s most ancient books turned to dust and blew into the cracked walls of crumbling libraries. When the first star was born in a magnetic bottle and its power was harnessed to make the world a fantasy of unending light, we shed that old skin of memory, of dream, shadow, and terror and began the expansion beyond the terrestrial.

In our quest to drink in the light of all the stars our universe could offer, in our dance with infinite space, and a newfound command of movement and time, we found worlds like our own. One in every thousand had the potential to raise life from its mineral rich soil, and on some we found the evidence of civilizations that had flourished and fallen before we had ever even mastered the use of fire. Thus, we learned that there had been life in the universe, but death had won over it.

Among the ruins of tumbled citadels sunk in grey sand dunes beneath the faint glow of a red star we wept. There would be no meeting with the alien other, no exchange of ideas or culture. Our archeological work began. Countless dead worlds came under our scrutiny as the expansion continued. For our biologists there came a few worlds where life was present as rudimentary single celled organisms. We would have to wait and see if our cosmic brethren might someday grow from one of these worlds.

Eventually, the expansion lost its appeal. Our songs had grown cool and calculated, our dreams had flown back to us empty handed. The age of our enlightenment was coming to a close. Our own star was near death for the second time. We had mastered the art of reviving it, yet it was upon this reoccurrence of imminent stellar collapse that we ceased to resist and plunged into darkness. The door to the inner world had been re-discovered in our arctic desert. Perhaps we had forgotten and remembered it many times during our evolution. Now we remembered it again. As our star shone small and white, its planetary nebulae dancing red and blue in the vacuum, the ancient seal was broken.

There would be no brotherhood among the stars, nor any great conquest there. No friends to keep nor enemies to vanquish, until the seal was broken, and the Old King rose from our hollow core with a fearsome bellow. His legions were loosed, his appetites awakened. In the moment of our most supreme boredom, we were catapulted into reckless, euphoric terror. Our Council was crushed, our infrastructure demolished, our stranglehold on light loosened.  The shadows grew longer, music roiled, wild and discordant, as the Old King showed us what it meant, that old word: vanquished.  He walked amongst us once more, drew us into the inner world and gave us gifts both beautiful and terrible. Upon the surface he ruled as he hadn’t for an eternity.

When the new sun was born the impulse to kiss his remorseless, deathless face had to be held at bay. The old King grew weary as it grew strong and we returned him to his sanctuary, singing our farewell. We were naked as we bore him back, our skins stained with the fruits of the vines, the soil from which they grew, the blood and sweat that had been spilled in our orgiastic remembrance. His legions followed and folded peacefully around him like fallen leaves upon a forest floor.  

Anything Goes

My grandfather used to have a building where he would do weird shit.
The sign above the storefront claimed that they made and sold shoes; this was back when shoes were made with leather and thread and skilled hands. There were generations of knowledge flowing through each decisive movement of those worn and callused fingers. I spent my early years watching them move, a rough ballet that smelled of grease and men and cigarettes. 
Later, as a young man, I tried to capture those hands in drawings and photographs, never quite able to capture the dimly lit afternoons where the light would filter in lazily off the sidewalk surfaces, or the silence that pervaded the space, the reverence they had for what they created.
Those dusty old men working behind the counter were my family, the worktables littered with scraps of pungent leather and metal tools became the fodder of my dreams. The shoe polish-stained fingertips and aprons, rough wrinkled faces that kept their eyes on their work, their tongues relaxed and silent.
My grandfather would give us new boots or dress shoes as birthday presents and he would teach us how to care for them with polish and bristles and tender attention so that they could shine like new.
So I know that sign outside the building was not a lie. They did make shoes in that old place with the brick façade and black wooden door.
But I know they were doing other weird shit in there too. Someone was.

There was a basement in the building.  I was not supposed to go down there, that was always clear. No one ever warned me, not grandfather or any of the other men there, nothing was ever said. It was more of an open understanding. I was not to venture beyond that door.
Although I knew this, I was a curious child, and the forbidden lair had a pull I could not deny. I had learned to blend into the dark shadows of the building, to step in time with the thumping needle of the sewing machine and the sporadic coughs of the men at their benches. I could open the door to the basement silently, and descend down the narrow dark steps into the dark chamber.
There was one tiny window at the top of the wall which faced the street at sidewalk level. Whenever someone would walk by the light inside would dance erratically on the brick walls. I listened intently for the sound of my grandfather’s footsteps.
I went down there only a handful of times in my whole childhood. The memories and sensations from those explorations have sunk to the deepest part of me and colored my vision.
In this forbidden space I once found a tooth.  Another time a red cloth napkin with gold jagged symbols, another time I discovered a small shell and a ball of hair in a little crevasse in the wall where the cement had broken apart between the bricks.

Whatever was happening there, it was not safe. In a dream one time just a few years ago I saw him emerge from the door at the top of the stairs with a bloody mouth. He looked at me. I was sitting in a chair just beside the door. He said, 'anything goes,' as he walked past me, holding up one single finger.
I woke with my hands fluttering, I gazed out the window, remembering the lingering smell of candles and matches on the brick walls. His silence, his deference to a room he never referred to, to a past never revealed but for one word, 'Nantucket.'

Tonight I will go back into the dream and tell him, 'you don't have to hide from me. I cannot be rattled.'

Sportz

I posted comments and sent emails on Facebook when I clearly should have been watching the American football. Now everyone will know that I am that despicable outcast that does not luv the American football. I wuz not invited to any parties full of potato chips and beer and 49er fandom. I did not even know that there would be parties to miss because I did not even have the good graces to realize the football wuz happening!

It wuz today! Oh my godz! And I didn't know to scream stuff like "Go 9ers!" I didn't even know I should be posting scores in my status. I didn't even know the name of the opposing team. It is a ball fashioned from pigs skin that is not shaped like a ball but rather like an inflated vagina pictogram, or possibly a lemon. Very big mens will run with it and throw it and crash into each other to take possession of it.  It's not a sport I likes.

I will tell you about the sportz I do likes.

I likes to watch the Christians being thrown to the lions. This is my favorite event. Also,  I like it when the big mens are given pointy objects and made to fight to the death, and if they wont fight, then the lions eats them too. When the lions is full we bring out the bears. We don't want the bears to gets hurt so when the mens fight with the bears we don't let the mens have any pointy objects. Instead we roll the mens in honey and give them a football, then let the bears in. We call this "Goldrush Rugby."

When the bears is full we take away the footballs but keep the honey and bring in the South American ants. We don't want the ants to get hurt either, so we tie the mens to posts.  We calls this event "Raisins on Celery." It's very slow but the mens screams the loudest in this event.  We usually use this time to replenish our supply of krispy Kale Chips and  refill our horns with mead. Then we plays some drinking games while we listen to the mens screaming and Katy Perry improvises a Merce Cunningham inspired dance routine in a skimpy patriotic outfit for the youngsters on a hovering stage above the field.

If Katy's not naked enough the kidz boo and then we chain Katy to the lego wall on the hovering stage and release the dragon. We never worry about the dragon getting hurt. He is bad ass. By then the ants is done and the field is cleared for the fireworks and laser show, but the people is already leaving the stadium or turning off the tv and posting the scores on Facebook:

Lions 30 Mens 0
Bears 10 Mens 0
Ants 4 Mens 0
Dragon 1 Katy Perry 0

Go Lions!

Then we run out into the streets to tip buses over and light them on fire. We play kick the can and freeze tag  by the warm light, organizing teams in accordance with which corporations sponsored our technical educationz or put our party's politicians in power (as is their constitutional right) or issue our paychecks. Then those of us who don't need abortions (our constitutional right) or some cosmetic surgery head home for bed so we can get up for work in the morning. The rest beat feet to the clinics before they're closed for the midnight Taco Bell run.

The New World

Yesterday he asks about my relationship to the café’s owners. I tell him they’re my friends. He says maybe he can make friends with me. I admit I’m easy to make friends with. His name is Erasmus.
Today I ask him if he plays chess. He says he can. I tell him I’ll bring a chessboard. He says it’s nice to have a friend. He tells me that someone else once said that we should love our friends with the greatest intensity possible from whatever distance is necessary. He explains that the woman he is quoting came to a bad end. I say that most extraordinary people do. He says that his mother was extraordinary and she led a peaceful existence. I amend my statement. Many extraordinary people come to a bad end.

This morning Walter Richard Patton came in and ordered a Danish. In high school he reversed the order of his first and middle name and came to be known by all as Dick or Dickie. His father died in Chicago the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. The next day Dick's younger brother, Arthur, came to him and said he wanted to join the Navy. He was 16 years old. Dick helped him to alter his baptismal record by changing a 5 to a 3, thus helping Arthur to gain enough years to enlist. Dick himself joined the navy shortly after his family moved to Utah.

Erasmus told me this afternoon that he once hunted down an archeologist who studies modern artifacts; eye droppers, paper cups, anything that can be found in an urban gutter. Erasmus located him, surprisingly, tucked away in rural Maine. The gentleman told him that he had worked in Berkeley on the development of the Nuclear bomb. He described the day after the bombing of Hiroshima, standing among the scientists who had helped create the most devastating weapon designed by mortal men. He told Erasmus that they all went a little crazy that day, the day after 66,000 people were killed all at once.

When Dick came out of the Navy he found himself in California. He could never bring himself to return to his family's home. There was a reason for this. In 1945 Art was lost off the coast of a small island in the South Pacific. Dick felt responsible. He was the one who had changed that 5 to a 3.

When Erasmus was ten years old his teacher and the school's principal called a special conference with his mother. In this conference she was told that her son was mentally retarded. She asked on what grounds they were making this proclamation. She was told that he didn’t understand that he should sit in his seat. He preferred to sit in the windowsill. She was then shown a paper covered in writing and told that he didn’t understand how to write in the lines. She withdrew Erasmus from the school and sent him to another.

Dick’s grandmother came from Austria with her husband and their family. Her brother in law brought his family all at the same time, but after passing through Ellis island, the two brothers never saw or heard from each other again. They simply lost one another in the strange new world.

I listen to Erasmus conducting an interview on the radio. He is speaking with a woman from England who leaked secret documents revealing a plot to bribe members of the United Nations into supporting the Iraq war. He asks her if she regrets having done it. She tells him she does not. She explains that she had thought the war might be stopped if she revealed the truth, but nothing came of her actions. She was fired from her job, she faced imprisonment, but there was a war just the same. Erasmus thanks her for her bravery.

Dick’s father died in Chicago the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. The day after the attack on Hiroshima, a group of scientists in Berkeley went a little crazy. One of them became an archeologist that studies modern artifacts. Arthur was lost at sea off the coast of a small island in the south pacific. Dick could never go home again. He sits in an empty café in Berkley, a very lonely old man with a heavy heart. Erasmus’s mother was an extraordinary woman who was told that her young son was mentally retarded. Later he was nominated for a Pulitzer. Now he is interviewing a person that hoped to prevent a war by telling the truth.

Someone said that we should love our friends with the greatest intensity possible from whatever distance is necessary. That someone came to a bad end. Many extraordinary people come to a lonely, painful end. They are simply lost, separated from those they once loved by choice or death or circumstance, left alone to face the strange new world.