Consequences

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Adam and I have had a chance to discuss many important issues. We agree that attitude is everything. He's convinced I've manifested my own ailments. He could be right. Basically, I've come several thousand miles across the desert and ocean to say goodbye to someone who wouldn't slow down for me if I was crossing in front of her car.

Oggy must walk in old man crouch due to spinal arthritis

One of the questions that needs answering is how to live with our modern comforts while not destroying the planet. The answer, I'm pretty sure, is that it isn't possible. It's basically like a gambler who has bet and lost the house trying to figure out a way to bet more. Or a shopper who has maxed out her credit card trying to spend more. How can it be done? The only answer is by getting more credit, by spending more of what you don't have or own...and that has now reached a global scale. Of course, not too many Kenyan refugees are reading this and unless you are a Doctors Without Borders volunteer then your electrified world is totally out of harmony with nature and you like it that way. I want to be positive but the possibility of owning iPods and gold based electronics without nasty consequences is too unrealistic even for my own twisted fantasy of living. See, my approach to the international insanity is to live in such a way that you would have to be offended. And then your mind might be in a position to realize that the modern world is living EQUALLY out of touch with reality. (I'll point out that EVERYONE IS TOO DUMB TO GET THE MESSAGE but my motives were pure.)

No, for some people to live in a future like Star Trek then most people will have to live in a world like Mad Max. That's the trade off. For every master there must be 20 servants. There can never be 21 masters and no servants. So it's a paradigm of servitude and exploitation that is in our nature and can't be expunged. It's a big game of King of the Hill like we used to play at Little Harbor elementary school, kids scrambling to the top of a plowed mountain of dirty snow in the December recess before Christmas break, our Star Wars toys wrapped in attic packages, hidden, noses red and running, mittens torn, boots squeaking, plaid pants wet with the salty runoff. We learn young to kick at those who reach for our leg, never to reach out and help. The recess monitors nodding in ignorant amusement as the children learn their hardest lesson: that only the select can stand at the top, that life is a competition and a savage struggle. Nearly 40 years later I question what I was taught but am helpless to unlearn it all and neutralized by the gigantic scale of the problem. 9 dying puppies in a cave made from flotsam. 500,000 Africans with no food or water. An oil industry determined to suck the earth dry and a populace content to fund and authorize or ignore it. Polar Bears needing air drops with survival food. Wolves plodding in silent, ageless stoicism. But communication now aided by satellites and gold from Peruvian mountains. We learn to rely on the bones of our past for nutrition. I carve my name like a hunter gatherer on the underside of this virtual cave. The Kenyan child clings to his mother's arm, dying. The puppy limps to an empty food bowl. The drought farmer sifts the dry soil. We learn to avoid consequences and embrace them.


"If the greater good is too lofty a subject to ponder then what does that mean about the common good?" Oggy Bleacher

cachorros

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what is the word for puppy? Perrito.

Adam found a dozen puppies living by the panga boats near the ferry starving and crying for milk while their mother languishes in the shade with dry tits. Unlike most Mexican street dogs these are not total mutts. He wants to take one to Panama on his overloaded peace motorcycle. I guess their fate hangs in the balance. They aren't the first pack of desperate dogs I've walked away from.

Confessions

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Mexico is a Catholic country so I thought I would spend my Sunday at the church in Todos Santos confessing. These are normally anonymous but I have nothing to lose by sharing with the world.
The poet grieves so his words may be bitten and bleeding. Beer cans offer no solace to the wounded philosopher. The mountains protected certain Indian tribes from the conquering Spanish but an old gringo sucking in his gut and blowing his nose on his memories has no such bulwark. He is unshaven and haggard and at war with the mirror of his demise, vainly inspecting his chin for drooping fat. He liberates the words of his own delusion so that they might highlight the road to salvation, if not for him then for others who follow in his path. The human experiment is generations long and each family preserves their own traditions or, lacking traditions, builds their own illusions. Affection for the young and innocent is paramount as the roots of trust are planted early and are easily torn up. Throbbing music and pulsating hearts march us to a destiny we might  write down in our own history, painting on the crumbling walls of our emotional caves the hieroglyphs that tell our story or myth to the future. Where does the heart hide when the wounded wolf drags his bloody paws to our door. Polar Bears survive off of food air drops to Labrador remoteness but the solitary rider awaits the scorpion bite to end his misery.

our branches ever reach for the sun

espinaza del diablo

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never again that sierra occidental mountain road crossing. still weeping tears of fear. worst road on planet.
wouldn´t be so bad if I was driving but taking a bus was brutal. like a 6 hour roller coaster ride in a curving tunnel where you can´t see what you are about to hit. the floor was wet with vomit but I managed to hold  my lunch down.
the return trip will be los mochis to Chihauhau on the train.

spellbound no more

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He stood a block from where he had seen her last and thought
¨This is where I saw her last.¨
The spell had lifted finally and his mind flowed with flighty dreams and a flood of language bound liberation. His suffering had borne fruit afterall. Her charisma was no different than before, of course her heart had moved on and he vainly and selfishly wished only to bask in her charm for a moment, like a deep canyon flower that only sees the sun an hour a day. Her lips and voice should be declared a national treasure, her face representing all of mexican lust. at first he was repulsed with how cosmoplitan she had become but as he was accustomed to realizing that his loathing was for himself, not her, and the way he was purchasing $300 ebony and rosewood guitar accessories with mother of pearl inlay. was that any different than Kipling bags and eyeliner applied with blatant casual indifference?
The flood of language he had waited for and dreamed about during the terrible term of his haunted love had finally arrived. He spun a mental tale like a Dennis Leary acid trip into magical circles of lunacy in front of him that made him laugh with delight. He was not Ashley to her Scarlett, like he´d initially thought, but he was Scarlett, independent and romantic and perhaps she was also Scarlett and they were both in love with their own ideas of love projected onto one another, her for a few days or hours, and he for  4 years...and this kind of mental recreation was the material he would need to disect in order to move to the next level of creative production. Her heart had moved on, as he knew, but his poet´s core needed more convincing...and now he´d been convinced. His emotional shadow was no longer an orphan. She´d kissed him goodbye, off to Rome, and he to his destiny with drama.
Men strode past in dirty trousers, women in new high heels, children in delight at the world, taking no notice of Oggy as he became reaquainted with the small corner, el rincon, of his heart that had been left behind, trapped behind her imaginary grasping designer jeans. ¨So, this is what it feels like to be complete.¨ The spell was lifted and he had reunited a portion of his consciousness with its other majority. Yes, one thing had been missing from his travels to Labrador and the distant corners of the continent, the darkness in the van, the scolding lights of the police, the drunks and degenerates decaying in a world of excess, but it wasn´t her, as he´d dreamed because her memory was worn to a high polish in his lazy brain, but it was him...his own unified heart and trust in the nature that had led him to the brink of continents and walking on crust of subducted grief. He had been incomplete and her presence was not the answer but it was the easiest excuse and the most romantically inclined to fulfill the desire of completion, the distant mother, the absent affection from his adult life, the cruelties of the world represented in the scolding glances and hurtful remarks of women who had stolen covers and snored and thrown his own humility in his face. He was a boxer with a long memory of low blows, resentment failing to protect him from the disgrace of his own futility and the invulnerable insecurity that had torn his soul asunder intentionally to provide and excuse to keep others at arm´s length.
The rich soil of his analysis would reveal the seeds of creativity and provide the nutrition his spirit needed. He was complete again....and was his education over? He wanted to believe that he had made the last of this genre of mistake...wasn´t it time to move on? He was a writer because he wrote and composed and lived as a writer would...and the trance needed to compose had been an oasis of serenity during his tortured years away from her. But now that the spell had been lifted he felt the dam of emotions he´d failed to transcribe already waiting overhead to be drawn in cement. Writing is descibed as duck hunting where you wait for the moment to shoot. Now all he saw were the multitude of ducks that had been there all along, but hidden by his grieving poet´s heart. A man couldn´t be more devoted and faithful to a woman than he had been to her ghost...and it had come to nothing...an empty wrapper...adios...so he´d felt the continent shift beneath his feet and incrementally his vision had been resurrected.
He walked slowly by an old building and saw a poster about pianos...?
Que?
Pianos?
He went in and immediately recognized the pianos from the Triunfo museum where he and Nicolas had bonded in the desert near the abandoned gold mind...symbolic of the end of his own futile mining operations into her heart.
The pianos had been moved following the death of Nicolas.
Lo Siento
The man invited him in with courteous, mexican hospitality.
He bowsed and played a simple Mexican cancion on a 120 year old Piano.
Pedestrians outside heard the music and smiled, holding hands tighter, but they didn´t see the tears on his face as he realized he wasn´t playing the song for Her anymore, no it was for life and the gift he´d been denied...but had pretended was his..but was now actually his again. The cycle had completed. Fortune had smiled on him. The spell was lifted. Goodbye to her, his love, may she have the time of her life with him, and hello to his heart that had been reunited, returning on a long journey, to where it belonged and in the uncertain soil of reality and not the virtual furrows he´d invented. He played the mexican waltz and the song carried into the zocalo near the church. The carnival celebration was resounding outside but no one bothered the gringo at the old piano as he played the simple mexican melody and cried.

espinaza del diablo

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never again that sierra occidental mountain road crossing. still weeping tears of fear. worst road on planet.
wouldn´t be so bad if I was driving but taking a bus was brutal. like a 6 hour roller coaster ride in a curving tunnel where you can´t see what you are about to hit. the floor was wet with vomit but I managed to hold  my lunch down.
the return trip will be los mochis to Chihauhau on the train.

News Cycle

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The predictability of our chew toy mentality and devotion to the lap dog media is grotesque. I force myself to watch the television to see what America is being spoon fed like fat babies with Gerber juice flowing out of our mouths and down our gullets. So, the nation has borrowed its limit, 16.5 trillion. I'm tempted to fillibuster my own ego in the pursuit of justice but the truth is that none of it is real. It's all a manufactured "event" to keep media whores occupied until the next mass murder or celebrity divorce. My disappointment in American mythology is so deep that it can't be salvaged. We live in a false and phony nation full of mysticism and superstitions and sports fanaticism and lip service to Jesus with an unread bible in one hand and a rifle in the other espousing peace through mystical dimensions.  There are over 7 billion people on Earth. 400+ million Americans. A million could die from flu outbreak this year and it wouldn't even turn the population graph line down. We are the ant colony that immediately forgets about the tidal wave of Big Red soda that drowns our habitat. The reality is that we're all redundant except to our own fabrications and the media feeds our false acceptance of the lies.

The common response to the Oggy Problem is that a quest to rescue wolves from Shell Oil or learn Hindu ballads on the Ud is pointless because it doesn't recognize reality. But my rebuttal is that those with loose lips and chicken scratch intellects only suck on the medium hot salsa of the world and ignore the countless arrays of picante. Basically, monitoring their own toes in the limitless cold water of reality to the depth that they can accept and then imposing their own shallow delusion onto others. It's all disgusting to me as are the television programs that horrify me. This is mass media and I will turn my back on it one day but it's like studying the cartel trade of broken virgin whores and then playing dominoes on slippery barstools of defeat with a crooked smile under sightless eyes.

So there is no solution as long as media influences reality perception. If we even took the $17 trillion debt as reality and accepted that the stars and stripes are like that junkie stoner kid you meet at a Phish concert who has a stolen credit card and he is buying everyone cool stuff and you can sleep in his luxury suite hotel for free. That's the reality of our negligent pride. The entire premise of America is to outlive our pimp so eventually we can fuck and give blowjobs to addicts in the cold alleys of our grotesque indifference and keep all our money. Maybe, we collectively hope, the pawn store will burn down and we can scavange the debris for our blood diamonds. We pawned our children to spread disease and pollution to every corner of the continent and then we hired marketing executives with counterfeit money to wed strippers wearing assless chaps made from Kickapoo Indian chief hides to promote the glossy new world as progressive and the manifest destiny of our nightmares. Congratulations. I always wondered how the Germans living outside the death camps rationalized their inaction. Now I know. They read the propaganda pamphlets and made excuses. Don't cause trouble. Don't ask questions. Protect your own. Fear the unknown. And they have a point because the American and Russian Liberators only made the citizens dig mass graves as their punishment for doing nothing...while the Nazi soldiers definitely would've executed them all. And that's the painful product of indifference and the demise of sad repose: it usually is safer to be the coward and after 40 years of an environmental holocaust we've manufactured the most indifferent citizenry with Fox news puppetry in our assholes making our mouths move like Kermit the Frog. The collusion is complete and the ironic generation now mocks rape...because that's their defense mechanism in an insane culture. Everything is a greater symptom of madness that becomes one more illness to ignore in our all u can eat buffet of greed.

But that's the road the media wants to invite me down. They want the futile conversation, the rant, the blog, the fillibuster; they goad people to revulsion because that's the best strategy handed down from Socialist Republics and propaganda specialists. "Ensure the public never has a moment of peace unless we manufacture that peace. Always keep them on uncertain ground." In two weeks, Fiscal Cliff...now Borrowing Limit. Next in line...Asshole Propositions Balls for Shit Legislation. It's excellent think tank strategy but I'm a hippie with conspiracy theories as my breakfast sandwich so pay no attention to me and keep watching American Dad and Football.