I layed in the sun and felt tired. My eyes were closed. When I opened them, the world was all pale blue--like plastic wrap. My wife wasn't wearing makeup. She said she felt car-sick. She could spin spider webbing around an entire day like this, not a waif of gold in sight.

On Rails

I was running. My car was broken-down behind me. I walked down a little embankment that led down to a dip beneath a massive highway interchange. It appears that the hole in the concrete was somehow etched and drilled through the concrete, and there were blocks of the grey-greenish mortar laying in tapering piles on either side. The little 'roadway' which humbly tucked its head beneath the known world was divited at its base, like the metal on an escalator step, and was muddied by traffic. What kind of traffic? The gap wasn't wide--it would perhaps fit a small pick-up truck-- and not much taller. It was about 3 average car lengths long; this gave me pause. There would be no space to dodge an oncoming car if I were to be caught halfway through. Head on collision with a car. What was the speed limit through the hole? There had not been any discernible speed limit signs or any other posted directional notices for quite some distance along his walk. The world had grown out of physical signage. Eyesores. By now nearly every car had navigation systems I suppose. I ran through the hole. The air was brisk and dank as I ran and reached the other side.

My friend was laying on his side propped up along the thorny wooden edge of a half torn-out cable car, connected to the cab of a semi-truck. He was draped over a strangely comfortable looking muddy-red satin sofa.
"I'm hiding here."
"Who from?"
"There are people who are trying to exact revenge on me."
"What for?"
"Its hard to explain, but you're part of it. If I had any self-respect left, I would have shot you in the head when you popped up from below."
I looked down at my feet. They were ragged looking, what was left of the red and white tennis shoes blended with the trash of old pornographic magazines and soda-cans, yet their image and gentle tremble, sent up a the hopeful and contrary feeling they were still vaguely biological. Unlike the rest of it, they still smacked of humanity.
"How many of them are there?"
"Four maybe five."
"Are they armed? Or should I say, do they have a reason to be armed?"
"They should be, but if they're not that's their fault. I'll rape them and shoot them in the head one by one."
"What is it about me that you think I'm involved?"
"You know what it is you were supposed to become, and you fell though on your duty to that fate. You're simply a conscientious-objector and not with any moral rationale. It's just that you see the perfection of fulfilment and you're trying to muddy it, as if you could bar-up the doors and barricade yourself against its fulfilment to break the line. Are you just curious--Do you want just to see the springs and bolts and conveyor belts inside the God-machine which would take you otherwise so inperceptively towards the goal, but now have to work ever so hard to take you from one side of the map to the other?"
"It gives me character. Also I don't want unwarranted attention."
"Unwarranted? I think what you're thinking is that this fate which I have correctly divined for you is actually some mutated form of parental expectations or some such self aggrandizing predilection; the instinct trending towards power and wealth and entropy. I'm telling you that you should be doing God's work, not your own. "
"If it's attention that I deserved to have anointed on my head as a result of work I had done for myself and by myself, then I could want it and enjoy its many advantages. Yet this is not the kind of attention we're talking about Chris."
We walked together, me with my ragged shoes and Chris with his insanity and green stripped turtleneck into the 'interior'... some kind of shack made up of boxcars semi-trailers on four sides and above a patchwork of brightly colored tarps tied dripping and flapping against their bearings. The wooden slat walls and smashed black steel door ajar at the entrance gap was the only part which was imprinted with the idea of human construction. It's wooden slats let in grey city light, and a smashed black steel door knocking against a rusted open deadbolt with an unsteady pulse of KONG, GONG, KONG-------KONG . The rest was just arrangement. Wire and tube wheels laid prostrate on their sides with bedding materiel and sawd piled on top for comfort. It was an elegant hovel when it came down to it. Grass flooring here, sanded plywood flooring there. No glass or screws or parts of screws to embed painful angry wounds or tetanus into Chris's foot and body.

We waited there in the semi-exposure, in the oasis for three days. On the third day a family came bobbing like fire in an open red and yellow jeep. A mother, a father, two daughters, one about twenty the other semi pubescent. The man opened up the door. He wore a tall boxy red trucking hat. We let them all in. "Nobody's here" the silence said, "Abandoned" the steel door agreed. Chris staged from behind the slatted wall in front of them, jumped and threw himself at the father with an aluminum bat, the presence of which had been hidden from me. He smashed the man in the head knocking off the hat in a swift, diagonal convincing burst of mad contortion, then slumped over the unconcious man, now lumped flat, in the shape of a lambda. The women were not panicked. They were lined up.

My wife sent me on a relaxation trip to New York city with a camera. The metro system looked down on turn of the century brownstones and apartment complexes. In one small hovel two elderly eastern-orthodox Russian ladies with brightly colored scarves wrapping their sagging face like over-ripened fruit, spoke in small puffs of white breath--they passed by in a high pitched scream of the steel rails, oiled and hot. I passed an architectural masterpiece covered in brown winter creeping vine, and reached for my pocket in a burst of energy in search of my camera, but the beauty had passed by the time I had the little machine operating. Little towers of brown-red brick and spotty brown and green vine with thissles of grass growing on small ledges and rooftop gardens gave this part of the city a warm countenance. 

Sickness, and mind's rest breaks out in a cold sweat. I cannot stand the smell, the stench that sickness breeds in bloated sickly bowels, and shots of bacterial fumes puff, puff out of a dumb, hemorroidal sphincter, ruining the crispness of fresh air. Maybe in Japan dead plants stink like this--Oe Kenzaburo is always keen to describe the foul aura created by detrital plant matter. At least in this arid-super-arid environment, these shots of methane are the worst thing I can think of smelling. I'm sure this is the scent of death--separated by incidental shifts in a state-of-being, like the difference between pig and pork. One is reminded of how the body is a vulnerable sack of flesh and reticulated nerves wrapping bones and blood vessels---it's a wake-up call; moreover it's a call to action.