by STEWART
KIRBY
POST 1
I remember when they found the bones down in the forest. Two skeletons
buried side-by-side near a big redwood. Buried hand-in-hand. One, the bones of
a woman, white, about thirty. What made it weird was that the other skeleton
wasn't human. Male bones. Eight feet-tall. A Bigfoot, everybody said. I used to
stare at the picture I clipped out of the paper. The picture of the two
skeletons buried together had to have shaped not just the way I thought about
Humbaba in my youth, it shaped the way I thought about myself. All growing up,
in the back of my mind, there were those bones buried side-by-side,
hand-in-hand.
There's a three-day race in Humbaba every year late in August called Local
Motion Days where competitors race in strange contraptions. Hallucimotions,
everybody calls them. I don't think that's the official name necessarily. Can't
be. Too blatant. That's what we always called them, though. I never thought as
a kid I'd ever want to watch a Local Motion Days race, much less actually
enter. Now I finished my second race and I'm already planning on my third.
Why? Well . . . .
I race because as kids we used to go to the rec room at the Whispering Woods
Motel in Madrani to play pinball, and ping pong, and shuffleboard, and play
some tunes on the jukebox. We'd get a Coke and some candy and go down to the
field and throw a ball. We'd go to the river, down to the bridge, listen to the
cars thump by overhead, reverberations echoing, and climbing back out, past bat
crap and poison oak growing in the cracks of the rock littered with little
busted bottle bits and graffiti leering down, like as not we'd see some rangy
guy sporting a beard and wearing dirty denim. A lot of guys looked years younger
years later when they gave in and shaved. But one good trip in a nice
hallucimotion makes up for a lot of that. So I race now for old cutoffs, the
dialing sound of a rotary phone, for a Wish Book left out on a table with pages
folded down and things circled inside, for a world of spinning phonographs, and
the feeling that the Beatles really might just get back together, the feeling
that everything we knew would unquestionably always last, and that the future
was forever distant, the other side of a finish line impossibly far away.
I've got twelve months--eleven and a half, actually--to make my greatest
hallucimotion yet.
This blog will be my support group. Everything that happens, from now on, I'm
recording it.
POST 2
There are some pictures on my Facebook page showing me going
through the process of making coasters. All of the wood I use in making Lost
Coasters comes from redwood branches that have already fallen naturally on
people's property. Usually what I do is work out a deal with people I know who
have a lot of property. I hike out where they tell me I can and I make a burn
pile or two for them, clearing away the branches I don't need while I look for
the ones that I do. I had to cut yesterday's entry short, actually, because I
could see time was running low for me to go out to the property of a friend of
mine and collect some good redwood branches of the proper diameter, which is
about four inches. I'll be posting videos here too showing the whole process of
everything I do here making Lost Coasters. So, in a way, this blog will be a
sort of marriage between my preparation for the big Local Motion Days race on
the one hand, and my day job making Lost Coasters on the other.
An odd marriage, see?
(VIDEO TRANSCRIBED)
"Okay, so here we are in the forest. This property here belongs to my
cousin, Eddie. Whose last name is Forrest, actually. I refuse to work with
people who aren't appropriately named. You should be able to catch your shadow
there, Eddie, on the--that's it. That's Eddie on camera, as you can probably
see. Anyway, all of this is Eddie's. We have a deal worked out, Eddie and I. So
I can see there's lots here to choose from. I'll just load some good-size ones
here. Oh yeah. Nice. And what I'll do here is collect about as much as my pickup
can hold, then, after throwing together a couple of burn piles in the vicinity
for Eddie here to torch at his convenience, I'll take all of these great
redwood branches back to my place and stack them up to dry."
(VIDEO TRANSCRIBED)
"And now I take my freshly cut pieces, give them the once-over on the
edges with the grinder, and hit both sides with the belt sander. Each Lost
Coaster comes hand-stamped, as you can see. And lastly, I package up my sets
like this, just very simple. And there we have it. Lost Coasters, hand-crafted
Humbaba County redwood. I sell these all up and down the coast. That's my day
job. Come on over here, now. I'll show you what I do at night."
(VIDEO TRANSCRIBED)
"Welcome to the Tripper Room. My soon-to-be floating room on wheels. This
is what I'll be racing in next Local Motion Days. In upcoming videos for the
blog here I want to get into some of the hallucimotions people have come up
with over the years, and maybe share some of the history, but right now we've
got the Tripper Room, which as you can see has this one window, which is made
of a single sheet of a very clear, very durable plastic, actually. What'll
happen when I put the Tripper Room in the river and get inside is I'll be able
to see both in the water and out. I can't wait. It's so important to me
that I do this. I have to be sure I don't cut my fingers off on the band
saw, I've been getting so excited. So anyway, we have out little ladder up to
the hatch here. And yes that is the only way in or out. It was just a small hole
there before. I cut it bigger and fitted the hatch there, and waterproofed it.
The whole room here is actually a water tank, or used to be. I put the window
in, of course.
"When we climb outside we see up top here there's this handy railing,
for safety sake, and stylishness. You can see along the edges all around
there's bumper padding. And that seat is actually a box. Mostly that's there
for the rope. Three hundred feet in there, actually. What I have to work on
next will be my wheel system, which I'll be able to assemble around the entire
frame. Although I would like to take the Tripper Room to the river on a test
run to see how she floats.
"It's gonna be awesome. I can't wait. I'll just tether it. Once I'm
sitting inside--I'll go down at night--bobbing in the river there, checking out
the view, wow, yeah. That's gonna be so sweet. I've got this fiber optic light
I've got set up in the front down low so it'll be submerged and I'll be able to
control it from inside. And I can turn it to different colors. Blue, red,
yellow, or just white. It won't be terribly bright down there, that's for sure.
It'll be interesting to see how much light it does shed.”
(LATER)
Windy tonight. I probably won't be able to make another entry here for a
couple days. I have to cut about four hundred coasters for my distributor to
take down to Circadia. I've come to actively despise cutting coasters on the
band saw, really. Can't listen to music. Can't zone out at all. I have to be
constantly on. As soon as I'm not, as soon as I settle into my thoughts, that's
when I cut those fingers off. But at least I don't have to cut every day. And I
got to settle into thought a bit right here, thanks to my handy Lost Coaster
blog.
Hell-oooo out there.
(LATER)
I researched Local Motion Days. Under the section marked "Hallucimotion
History" I found some interesting things. Disputes with the roots, for
one. Evidently there's confusion over who actually started it. I always thought
it was Paul Damon. But now I see a couple online sources say it was some other
guy. So whatever with that. Either way, everybody agrees that the race is run
in elaborate carnivalesque contraptions, and that they get powered by costumed
people parading around and generally making merry.
POST 3
Greetings from the Tripper Room. I'll type in whatever I write here later
on, because I'm actually writing right now by hand with pen and paper listening
to the Stones. It's important I spend as much time in here as humanly possible.
Haunting visions of majority unemployment run rampant tonight. People groped at
airports, that's normal now. Cops throwing people out of their own homes in
service of banks acting illegally is normal now, too. Unions stripped. Treasury
looted. Already there's synthetic meat, made from human crap. Dehumanization
complete.
Tornadoes ripping across the country . . . polar ice caps disappearing . . .
flocks of birds falling from the sky . . . must design best possible entry in
race . . . must focus every fiber of very being . . . on Tripper Room . . .
(VIDEO TRANSCRIBED)
"Morning. Looking for limbs. Ah, there's a likely candidate.
"A rough morning at the office as you can tell. Terrible view, too. It's
as hard to imagine there's a world out there as it is the other way around.
I'll branch out here. Like how every day, if we're informed, we see
stories on celebrity style mishaps matched maybe by a mention of the vanishing
middle class and minimum-wage college grads. Ah, another good one!
Wait--too punky. College grads . . . college grads . . . right. Every front-page
fashion flop gets balanced by a new Supreme Court ruling against Civil
Liberty. A recipe for roasted Portobello, and government torture of
whistleblowers. For each piece of news about a red carpet fizzle, when there
should have been a sizzle, there's a blurb about unmanned planes dropping bombs
on towns, or companies spying on customers with cameras hidden in computers, or
tap water tainted with some new pollution. It's like walking in two worlds at
the same time in this country every day. It's unreal.
"There's a pretty good one right there--except it's swimming in poison
oak.
"So, as rising rivers force residents to flee, homelessness increases, and
crime goes up, and prison populations jump, and cheap prison labor grows, and
bloated corporate profits swell, and skyrocketing carbon output climbs, and the
ice caps melt faster, changing the courses of the rivers, causing more
residents to flee . . . .
"So many things to think about at work. Passes the time, anyway, as I
gather my sticks and try to survive. Well, now you can see we have a pretty
good-sized pickup load. Time to head on back."
(LATER)
Hizzah! My first comment! An actual follower! Here's what they wrote:
luv
ur crazi vids, Zen! keep up th good work!!:)
It's from someone named Rora, evidently. I responded back:
Great to know
somebody's out there! Thanks for the follow!
I messaged with Bud on Facebook about it.
ME:
You there?
BUD:
what up
ME:
I have a follower.
On my blog.
BUD: who
ME:
Someone named Rora.
She posted
praise for me.
BUD: must be a nut
(ZEN’S JOURNAL)
Wow, I think I really have a fan. It's like everything I do is all for her.
'Cause she's the only one. And I have to say, really good-looking. I accepted
her Friend request on FB. She's got a bunch of pictures up. In every single one
she's totally hot. That kind of hot can't be faked, can't be a fluke. Not that
such things matter. She's a long-haired brunette with natural henna touches,
apparently. Big green doe eyes. Bow-shaped mouth, angelic face, nice curvy
figure. Looks real sweet and super sexy.
We have some of the same book likes in common. She digs Poe and Lovecraft, too.
Picked up the tri-stick today and practiced half an hour. First time in
ages.
(FACEBOOK MESSAGE EXCHANGE)
RORA:
knock knock
anybody
home?
ZEN:
Hi!
RORA:
quick questiin
ZEN:
Okay.
RORA:
u liv in hum, right?
ZEN:
Yep. You?
RORA:
i live near werman
ZEN:
Right on! Werman is where Local
Motion Days starts.
Below there, anyway.
RORA:
so true : )
we
should meet
ZEN:
Indeed.
We should.
RORA:
i've never met anyone here
from
online
in
person
ZEN:
Me either.
RORA:
when do u think the tripperroom wil
be
ready?
ZEN:
To float?
RORA:
yah
ZEN:
It can float right now.
RORA:
i kno some good spots
ZEN:
Where?
RORA:
have to sho you
ZEN:
I'd like to see.
When?
RORA:
howbout 2moro?
ZEN:
Sounds fine.
What time?
RORA:
2?
im
flexible tho
ZEN:
2 is fine.
Where should we meet?
RORA:
darrows bend
park
in front of market
ZEN:
Okay!
I'll be there!
RORA:
cant wait! cya! : )
ZEN:
Zen out
POST 4
(ZEN’S JOURNAL)
Dear Tripper Room, thank you for making this magic happen. Thank you thank you
thank you.
Rora, my fan, messaged me on Facebook and we met. Have to say, I wasn't in the
best of humor that morning. My head was killing me, probably from the
repetitive motions required for cutting coasters most of the day. By the end of
the day I was too exhausted to even think about putting the wheels up on the
Room. That itself is becoming a huge headache for me. But I was kind of wired
too, thinking about Rora all day. Got some cleaning done. I kept having to
remind myself that it's no big deal, she's not actually a "fan" in
any sort of heavy sense at all of course, and our getting together wasn't
actually a "date." So I stayed up till three cleaning, and slept in
till ten, which is way off the schedule for me, and made me feel sort of
disoriented. Probably threw my blood-sugar out of whack. Then before I knew it,
it was after one and I had about a half an hour to shower, noticing how badly I
need to workout, and feeling poorly toward coffee for staining my teeth.
However, driving down the Avenue with that nice crisp fall air, tunes cranked
up and the windows down, having taken care of my headache properly, oh yeah,
things started picking up quite well. She was waiting for me in front of the
market, checking out the bulletin board. I recognized her from her FB pics
immediately. She looks even better in person.
Walking together down to the river I was conscious of feeling at every moment
that sense of being in a dream. I saw the redwoods through new eyes. They
towered before us, a palpable fog hanging over the river, looking sufficiently
tangible to ride, as though Rora and I might have fashioned a grappling hook
comprised of vines and branches had we wished, for tossing up over the top, and
pulling ourselves aloft to be lost from view at any moment by ducking back and
hiding on the fog slowly following Mist River from above.
We saw a wasp's nest fall on a snake. It happened a good ways off from
where we were sitting, but it was very easy to see. The
nest had to be bigger than a human head. It lay on the ground, busted
open. All the little chambers exposed, like a split pomegranate. The snake
must have happened to be underneath when the nest fell. Hundreds of
wasps came out in a loud cloud and furiously attacked. I don't know what
kind of snake it was, but it was big and thrashed around in a
electric display gruesome to watch. Really disgusting. Probably it's for the
best we didn't get that on camera. But it was just the sick and twisted kind of
thing to force a little chuckle, and the truth is we both wound up
laughing like lunatics at how gross the whole thing was to
watch.
She sure is something.
We walked by parts of Darrow's Bend, still population 215, where I'd never even
been before. We did pass by an old house where a friend of mine used to
live growing up, Tom Hawk. I remember when he was in his 20s he did a
thing where he was strung up suspended with sticks through his pecs for a
couple of days before he became officially recognized as a Yupa Indian
shaman. Plus he drove a truck. I remember he was already doing
that in high school.
One time, when we were both in our 20s, I went to see Tom. I was a college
student then, living in Carata. I was just looking for some weed. But I was
also going through a whole huge breakup with my girlfriend at the time, unsure
of who I was or where I was going. And I really did want his help, and
believed--no, knew--he would be able to say something to help me find the way
within myself. Even though he was only my own age. He had that quality about
him. A true healer. I went to see him at that house. He sat there in a
chair in the middle of a room where he had countless little pictures and things
on the walls all fluttering around with a fan on. Colorful pictures
on the walls rolled up and down like party favors. Everything looked like
Clay-mation, hyper-colorful. That was the night he told me how he saw visions
of himself in the future appearing disturbingly assimilated, and that he knew
he was in a race against time to stay himself and keep in touch. With the
powers of the universe, I suppose.
Rora showed me a couple of good spots in the river, deep and wide and still,
perfect to test run the Tripper Room. We took my car back to my place to show
her the Room. She seemed to get a kick out of being in a Pinto.
We went down together. Inside the Room. I can still see those big doe eyes
looking so interested and sweet while I told her all about
hallucimotions and showed her how mine worked. It made me feel so
alive. Still does.
I asked if she was religious, and she told me she was a witch. She asked if I'd
ever heard of Anthropos. I told her no.
"Anthropos is Lord Bacchus," she said. "He is the God
Dionysus, here in Humbaba, in his most natural, powerful form, living in
these ancient forests.”
"Really?" I said, sensing I should be polite, but unsure if she
was serious.
"Really," she affirmed. "You would probably call Anthropos by
the more common name of Bigfoot."
She has a group that gets together, evidently. We kissed and felt around
awhile, right there in the Room. Ah, sheer magic. I'll never be able
to hear Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" again without thinking of it.
POST 5
If you're interested in entering the race, first of all, you're at the wrong
place. My Lost Coaster blog right here is by no means the Local Motion Days
headquarters at all. All I can do is to help you, if that's what you're looking
for, help you to understand what to expect, and give you my own impressions
based on my experiences participating twice already.
To begin, it's a three-day race. The first leg starts out on the old road
down in the forest below Werman, which is about forty minutes south of Egeria.
You want to get there an hour early, minimum. You start out at nine a.m. on the
Avenue of the Giants, in Humbaba County, of course, with most people stopping
for drinks at Darrow's Bend. Usually games go on there in town, a tiny town
surrounded by giant coast redwood. Bigfoot is everywhere. Chainsaw-carvings
abound. There are games such as the Burl Hurl, plaid-clad contests for plain,
bearded folk. Folk of long hair . . . and cesspool stare . . . always booths
all over with the tie-dye and the selling and the necklaces and things. There
might be any number of pitstops the bulk of the way down the Avenue, but by the
time the hallucimotions reach the bottom of the hill up into Madrani, the
stragglers catch up, and that marks the Promenade of the Odd, where all the
costumed, sloshed participants are greeted like heroes. The field across from
the school will be filled up with food carts and sundry booths, and there is
live music for the ponytailed, ancient vendors hawking wares, and with the
music there is dancing, and in the Burl Hurl young hick kings of goober chic
compare how far they can chuck old wood. You get toasted, you camp out. Day 2
you leave at nine for the river, spending the day drifting down the mighty
Mist, Ol' Mist, until you reach the flats well past Darrow's Bend, party and
camp out there, and then at ten the next morning take the old road east over by
Dreem at the lake, with music and dancing the rest of the day and all through
the night.
That said, faux-competition is the order of the day. Naturally along the way a
certain degree of rivalry develops. If the costumed participants in the
Logger-Mobile see the Hippie-Mobile slide off the road, they'll make a big deal
about it, with sneers as they pass. But that of course means nothing. The only
way the race is won is when the mistletoe gets ritualistically wrested from the
overhanging bough of the Goddess Redwood.
We're still trying to figure out exactly why. But, one day, one great day we'll
know.
(VIDEO TRANSCRIBED)
"I have with me here today one Rora Hearn, a self-described Follower of
this my Lost Coaster blog. A fan, if you will. Rora, one question:
Why?"
"Why do I Follow your blog? Oh, I don't know."
"Name a reason."
"Well, there are just too many, Zen."
"Name one. Come on. Name a reason. Surely you can come up with one reason
why you took the time to type in your email address there at the
top."
"Your persistence. I found it oddly endearing."
"Come on. You can do better than that."
"Your punctuality."
"You Followed my blog because of . . . my punctuality?
"Yep."
"Can't come up with anything more interesting than that?"
"You're not interested in punctuality?"
"Hey, I'll ask the questions here."
"If anybody should get to do any interviewing, it should be me."
"What? But--"
"Be quiet and start talking. First question: How on earth did you start
making Lost Coasters?”
"Well, Rora, like all great ideas, mine started with a drink. It
was a warm day, and I had put some ice in my drink. When all of a sudden, I
spotted wetness. A ring, if you will, left upon the table where I had set my
drink. So to speak."
"Why didn't you use a coaster?"
"Yes. I'm getting to that. Where was I?"
"Wetness."
"Exactly! And soon after that, I happened to see a redwood tree, all
majestic and rising."
"Next to the table?"
"Yes. And looking up, I saw branches."
"But you get your branches from the forest floor."
"That's true. That's why I looked down again and noticed the ones
there. And I figured, if I cut the branches, I could have coasters."
"From Humbaba County's Lost Coast."
"Rora, you crystalize my thoughts eloquently. Yes, from the Lost
Coast."
"Well Zen, then what did you do?
"I had lunch."
"What was it?"
"Chicken salad."
"That about covers it. And there you have it. Zen Mendosa, thank you for
that interview."
"You're welcome!”
Two days from now we'll be taking the trusty Tripper Room on her first
test-run in the river. Hopefully not her last . . .
POST 6
I'm champing at the bit to get the Tripper Room in the river. Gonna be
awesome. I'll see if I can get Rora to come.
Working in the Tripper Room here, I feel like Indra developing his vision
for the castle always growing. I keep my conga drums inside. Literally and
metaphorically. But hey, if I can ever find a Theremin at a good price, I sure
wouldn't mind getting one of those.
(VIDEO TRANSCRIBED)
"Test run! Yes! All along the Avenue of the Giants, the solemn gray thread
of redwood-lined road shines, ah, sure an' it shines from a wee
mornin' sprinkle, wet asphalt a-glint an' alight, bright fingers of
sunlight streaming through the tall straight stalks of the great grooved trees.
"To step off the road is to step onto duff, soft,
rust-toned bits of broken redwood twigs, twigs broken off by birds high
above, or snapped off in the wind, and step now we have indeed done, my
associate and I--my "fan," if you will.
"Now, as you can see, we're surrounded by limbs of all sizes fallen
to the forest floor, where the bodies of other trees which once long stood
exhibit the startling stages of decomposition. Up close to the trees you feel
the bark. So fibrous, so insulation-like. You can use this stuff as
insulation. That's a fact. Did you know that? It's true. God, it's all true.
Look up: Can't climb. Too big! The nearest limbs don't even start till a
good eighty feet up on this one. Eighty fudging feet. Walk around the base.
Twenty-five, maybe forty steps. Geez. And far above, the gentle sway. So
gentle. Listen: Listen to the subtle creaks high above in the breeze.
"Well, enough standin' around shootin' the fat. Better hightail it back
down to the flatbed. Never leave a Tripper Room alone on the Avenue for
long! Some Bigfoot might sneak out and start messin' with it.”
(LATER)
Okay, here we are. I'm writing this on my laptop right now. We have reached
the river. Now comes the unloading. Rora's getting the camera back out. This
should be interesting. I'll set the laptop aside and get the maiden voyage on
video!
(VIDEO TRANSCRIBED)
"Greetings from the Tripper Room, baby! We are in the water! Hally-looyah!
"Well, here we are. Experiment initiated! Yes! Subject immersed. Via this
vehicle. Yes! Woo hoo! To the realm of the unconscious we now begin our
transcendental journey, bubbling water raging at the glass . . . . Window to
another world. The river water surges in a manner producing a sensation akin to
being, how shall we say? . . . deep inside a humongous water pipe. Yes, that's
it. I know now what the genie in the bottle feels. I am become the show that
glows in the box.
"Tripper Room bobbing in the constant pulse of the current, check. No
sign of leakage, check. All systems go. This baby is yar. Aar, she's yar.
"Listen to the sounds of the surging. What a wonderful bubbling tumult.
It's positively otherworldly.
"So, I'm in the Room, obvious enough, and the Room is submerged in an
ideal spot in Mist River, the exact coordinates of which I deeply believe would
be unwise at this juncture to reveal. What makes it ideal is the depth of the
river here, the speed of the flow, and the absolute seclusion. I mean, this
place could not be more perfect. Accessibility coupled with seclusion,
actually. Yeah, I'm just relieved to find how top-heavy the Room is
not, have to say. And to see that the window doesn't leak in the slightest. Not
the slightest. Who cares about the damn Local Motion Days race, you know? I'll
just live down here! God, I love this so much. And I mean, I would not be in
here if I was concerned about safety in the slightest. That didn't come out
right. I mean, if I wasn't absolutely certain of it. Anyway, as a matter
of fact, I really think the Tripper Room can hold more weight.
I'll go up and let my associate outside know that it's safe and it's time
she went down with me in here. God, this is sweetness. I'm
following my bliss. Look at me, Ma! Bottom of the
river!
"Zen out.”
POST 7
(ZEN'S JOURNAL)
I feel so inspired down here. It's uncanny how right this feels. Like being in
the womb, Down here I can totally get immersed in a story. I hear the constant
rushing flow. Rora likes my stuff. Having even only one person believe in you
is as strong as a million. She's sitting here with me right now. She's got her
eyes closed, and her knees drawn up. In the fetal position. All fetal. We're
listening to Zappa's "Apostrophe," having read some stream of
consciousness with Joyce's
Ulysses.
(LATER)
Claustrophobia is what I feel when exposed to the globalized fascism outside
the true freedom here in the Room. Sitting in a bobbing submerged vessel at
night with fiber optic lights illuminating the roiling river underwater is, I
must honestly profess, emphatically the only way to fly.
Dark shapes caught in the weirdly-lit and churning, ever-changing display lend
an eerie feel. Eels, it seems, most of the time. They slide and bump against
the glass--curious, spurious, snake-like fish. They study us as much as we
study them.
And we come into being in water. We float, kicking, suspended unaware by
unknown means. Outside, events occur beyond our reckoning which affect us in
ways we will never understand. Inside, we dream. And we are in a river now,
where we have always been, and the river carries us, sometimes speeding up,
sometimes slowing down, but we cannot escape its inexorable pull, cannot turn
back the constant flow.
(VIDEO TRANSCRIBED)
"Here we are out in the woods once again, looking around for fallen
limbs. Just another day at goddam work. From the arcane magic of the submerged
Room, to living out the cover of Led Zep's fourth album. I keep expecting to
see royalty tromp by clapping coconut shells. Today we're in the Tumik area of
Southern Humbaba County, out past Bargerville, somewhere east of Hawthorn. As
you can see, the pluckings here are certainly ripe.
"Now, as I go about picking up sticks, using my best theater-voice, to
be sure I'm heard--as I go about picking up these sticks--oh, there's a
goodie!--I'd like to say, first of all, hey, thanks for checking out my blog
here! I really, really appreciate it. So far, it's just one person I've got
Following me here. I know. Wow. And I do appreciate her being my fan and all,
but, yeah, I could sure use some more Followers! Type in your email, and I
promise you, I will give you all I've got, blog-wise, be it regarding the Lost
Coaster business, the whole process, the real world of it all, or be it the
whole crazy hallucimotion project--whoa, there's a nice one!--and yeah, I think
there's a lot I could do to make this blog more visible, establish more of an
online presence. Probably a big part of what I could do to see my blog succeed
would be to really focus on perpetual panic-mongering. Certainly I can't
help but notice as I pick up sticks, like a Medieval peasant, that corporate
profits are up, up, up after the big orchestrated economic collapse.
Theft, if you prefer. Theft of the Treasury. And here this whole time I
really haven't terrorized my audience at all. What was I thinking? Obviously,
fear bypasses the part of the brain that uses reason, causing the viewer to not
think rationally, and therefore be more likely to comply with the wishes of the
manipulators. Oh hell, the batteries are low."
POST 8
(FACEBOOK MESSAGES
BETWEEN ZEN MENDOSA AND RORA HEARN)
ZEN:
Hello there.
Are you there?
Guess not.
RORA:
im here
ZEN:
I have a great idea.
RORA:
do tell
ZEN:
Let's go camping this weekend.
In the Tripper Room.
In Mist River.
RORA:
wish i could
can
b there some of
ZEN:
Okay.
RORA:
i have a meeting sat nite
some of
tho, ya!
ZEN:
Some is good.
RORA:
what r speciifics?
ZEN:
I was just thinking of leaving the Room
moored in the same
spot
RORA:
good spot : )
ZEN:
Definitely.
RORA:
will hav2have more fun:)
ZEN:
Absolutely.
RORA:
what time u want 2 meet?
where?
ZEN:
I should get there around 10 am
I'll call you when I
get there.
(ZEN'S JOURNAL)
I see now what the Tripper Room is: A magic implement. It is a vehicle of
magic. Hey, what can I say? Thanks, universe! You know? Just . . . thanks.
Who's the best universe in existence? YOU are! Yes you are! Prrr . . . prrr . .
. nice universe, GOOD, good universe. Everything coming into alignment most
excellently indeed, heh heh heh! Rora says I need to see the Man in the Tree, a
carving which she says she's seen, a carving of a seated figure on a throne,
carved high into a huge old redwood . . . two hundred and forty feet up. It's
amazing, evidently, and must be seen to be believed. We also have plans for me
to see the magic tools Rora will be buying soon. That was, in fact, what gave
the idea of the Tripper Room being more than merely an entry in next summer's
Local Motion Days race, more than the mere people-powered hallucimotion of a
humble crafter of redwood coasters.
There is something so soothing in the feeling of submergence in this bobbing
room. I can totally see how William Hurt turned into a monkey-man in one of
these babies. In the Tripper Room, I'm Captain Nemo! Ah, the wonders of
the window. At any moment, I expect to see a gill-man. In fact, it really
would be terrible to see . . . well, I hate to say it, but . . . the body of a
shark against the window. Coolly passing. Terrible to feel the Room move as the
great white shark slides slowly by . . . and bumps it . . . .
All around now, the river rushes on. Mist River has become for me an
existential truism. More than ever. This time it being personal. Now the sound
of the existential river is steady, now the sound is hurried. In the sound
everywhere I feel the endless shapes of life. And yes, I see in the water
deeply. My fiber optics lights are sound.
The waterline rises almost to the top of the window with me in here alone. With
Rora's added weight the Room might barely be completely submerged, top hatch
and all. She should be here in an hour or so. I am so exhausted. I have
to go to sleep.
(THREE HOURS LATER)
Had me a nap, all right. Still groggy. No sign of Rora, either.
I looked around outside already. Reckon I'll mosey on over to Darrow's Bend and
get some snacks. I already left out a couple of notes for Rora to see, just in
case. It's great being able to leave the Room moored without fear of it being
found, and that's exactly what I can do.
(TWENTY MINUTES LATER)
Well crap, my Pinto's dead! Bummer days. God dang it, my trusty Rozinante, no
more. Won't start. Doornail-dead. Now this means I can't get the extra
snacks and few more bottles of cold beer. Simply a cold beer to enjoy. And
still no Rora.
Ah, screw it. Rozinante was on her last legs a long time. Rora will show
up. It'll suck having to get another car. Used, of course. But, no point
stressing out. This right here's a test. And I know exactly how to pass. Right
now I need to focus on my work. I need to really get into it. I'll get
that online presence going somehow! By the blogging gods, I'll show
the e-viewing world just how much goddam fun a guy in a room in a
river can be! I can't fail. The exponential potential for growth with Lost
Coasters is real so long as I'm consistently active. My search engine rating
can't help but climb so long as I deliver consistent content. And the thing is,
I have no choice. I have to stay afloat. Somehow I have to manage not to let
myself sink.
(FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER)
Dearest Tripper Room, take me away. This hatch . . . is closed. Bit of music,
my sweet? What shall it be? Zappa? Chieftains? Gipsy Kings? The Ninth?
Here's to you, Tripper Room. Thank you, Great Spirit, my guiding hand and ghost
bus. Thank you for being my friend, my safe and inspiring magical place that
helps restore me to my natural, peaceful state. Thanks for being my positive paradigm
facilitator, and for helping to release my mellowness caged by the machinery of
the system everywhere outside.
Hold on. This calls for video.
(VIDEO TRANSCRIBED)
"Greetings, social media fans! You know, in the future, rivers will
rise due to the vast influx of bobbing Tripper Rooms moored to
shores. Handsome mooring hooks supplied by State parks will one day be the
norm. But, right now, it's just me, blazing the Tripper trail. By the way, do
be sure to subscribe to this blog! We might have been experiencing technical
difficulties up until now, but now it should certainly be easier than ever to
go ahead and quickly subscribe. And after you do, just click on the
first blog post, titled LOST COASTER BLOG, POST 1. Have a read! When you get to
the bottom of the that one, click where it says NEWER POST, and by golly
that'll take you to the second, and so on, and so forth. Be sure
to check out the other posts, too. There's so very much--
"Holy crud! What the--
"Rora, is that you? Sounds like something just hit the--
"Holy! What the hell's going on? Who's shaking the Room? Holy crud it's an
earthquake! Oh goddam—
"Oh my god!”
POST 9
(ZEN'S JOURNAL)
I saw the fissure widen as the Room fell in. I can't get the image of the
widening fissure out of my mind. I can't stop seeing the river just fall away
like that. I can't stop going over . . . going over. I still see the
Tripper Room tipping over the edge.
I have no idea how far I slid. It could be a hundred feet down or a thousand.
And dark, it's so dark outside. For the most part quiet now. I can
hear water rushing somewhere. But I can't tell where I am and I'm too afraid to
move. The Room slid for a long time at about a forty-five degree angle, then
stopped, but I'm still not on level ground. I'm still at a forty-five degree
angle, stopped, I think, on a lip of rock. I'm afraid if I move around much
I'll dislodge the Room and fall again. God that was awful. I have a few sources
of light in here at least. It really helps to write things down. Can't panic,
have to think. Rora will show up. She'll see the Room gone. Will she see a
chasm, though? Or did it close? What does it look like from outside?
I still feel leaning over, looking down into blackness. The tether must have
held the Room for a few seconds before snapping. The Tripper Room rode down
shafts of sunlight piercing into the blackness. I was absolutely helpless. I
thought it was all over. All I could do was scream.
I have to do something. I have to move. I have to. If I could only reach the
hatch certain that the displacement of my weight won't dislodge the Room. What
if there's an aftershock? I can't sit here and do nothing.
Okay. Here goes.
(VIDEO TRANSCRIBED)
"Look at this. Oh my god I'm in love. This is without a doubt the most
beautiful place in the world. My god just look at this. The Tripper Room is
fine. My Mag-Lite has a long reach and you can see it only fades into further
blackness. Man, this could all keep going in for miles, just miles for all
anybody can tell. Wow! Down over there is a pretty steep drop off to there's no
telling how far down. But, over here, there's a lake--right there. The water's
still really cloudy, but in one spot where I shine the Mag I can see it's deep
enough to take the Room. I think I can slide the Room, as is, right on
over the edge. See, up there's where the quake opened those two sides of rock.
You can see a little light coming in from outside up there. I wouldn't want to
stay down here too long, but I can't pass up this chance. No way. Besides,
there really doesn't seem to be any danger now.
"My god this place is heaven. I see I'm running low on battery. Got to
save some for in the Room. I'm going back inside."
(ZEN'S JOURNAL)
I love it here.
The dust has settled in the lake. I can barely believe I'm actually here
underground, living the dream, checking out stalagmites rising forty feet down,
the tops of which the Room almost bumps. The spire-tips glow bright green in
the wide glare of strong fibre optic cables, miraculously unhurt in the
harrowing fall.
But now, wow. This is so incredibly spectacular. I actually screamed in the
Room. I sat inside, staring for half an hour after that. Seriously. Half an
hour at least.
I started talking to myself and that sounded way too loud. So I tried
whispering. I whispered to myself down in the dark here for a while. That
got to be a bit much. So I've been listening to music. The way it resonates
through the lake is amazing.
The Tripper Room's stable enough that I'm actually perched on top right now
quite comfortably without rocking the Room too much or getting wet at all, so
far. I have to admit, I am a little leery about sitting up here. It's damn
dark, first of all, so you feel like you're in a fish bowl for anything that
might be watching. Even though you know no one could be watching at all. It's
an eerie feeling, vulnerable, like you're perched for dinner on a floating
plate for any long-necked dinosaur-type creatures that might come swimming by.
Hold on, that's funny. My cell phone is ringing.
It's very odd, because my cell phone's batteries have been dead for the last
several hours. It's definitely going off. That's my cell phone, all right.
Doesn't sound at all like my ringer, though. Somehow, that's my dead cell
phone ringing.
Now it's stopped.
There's a message on it. The message says:
WHY DON'T YOU GET OUT OF THE ROOM?
POST 10
(ZEN'S JOURNAL)
I've been sitting here for a solid hour watching my dead cell phone
spin. Just the darnedest thing. Spinning like a top. Then, about a minute
ago, I said, "All right," and poof, suddenly it stopped. So I'm
really doing it. I know I have to. I'm getting out of the Tripper Room now.
I'm going to climb back out. Out on top of the Room. I'm going to paddle the
Room back to the bank, and I'm getting out of here. Right now.
(TEN MINUTES LATER)
Okay, I got out of the Room, but I can't get out of the cave. I really am
trapped. I just don't see any way out at all. I think the opening that was
left after the earthquake must have shut all the way. Because it sure was open
before. God, why didn't I go? Why the hell didn't I get out when I had the
chance?
Hold on. My dead cell phone. It's acting up again. The message I'm getting
says for me to take the trail. I can see the Tripper Room from where I am, and
I think I see the way I'm supposed to go. I've got my Mag shining on what looks
like a natural trail.
Okay, I'm going to stop writing now. I'll put my camera on microphone-only
and stretch the battery-life. All right. Here I go.
(AUDIO TRANSCRIBED)
"I see long combs of limestone hanging all
around.
"High above, a sky of stone, towering cliffs lost in an
impenetrable blackness.
"From what I can see, vast amazing veins lace sheer rock walls, marbled
slabs lean like giant flakes of flint in haphazard fashion, each monolithic
slab greater than the next. In distant seas of shadow, crenelated stone
curtains span black chasms where raging cataracts plunge into never ending
midnight.
"Dammit, there's a message on my dead cell phone again.
WHERE ARE
YOU? it says.
"I can't seem to message back. Who the hell is doing this? Now here's
another one!
"
WHY DON'T YOU RETURN TO THE LAKE? it says.
"'I'd love to,' I keep trying to message back. 'How the hell do I get
out?' I'm not sure, but I think that one might have gone through.
"
TURN ON YOUR LIGHT.
"
DO YOU SEE THE TUNNEL ON YOUR LEFT?
"'Yes.'
"
TAKE THE TUNNEL.
"I'm turning off the microphone now."
(ZEN'S JOURNAL)
I staggered around the underground, aiming for the tunnel, going with the
messages, going with the flow. Lagoons were lit. Stars shone bright in the
stalactite sky. In the tunnel I followed a creek all the way back to the lake,
where I saw the Tripper Room, heart leaping like a cave-painting, and I got on
board, and I climbed inside, and I stood there watching the water-line lap,
maybe for minutes, maybe for hours, I couldn't tell. Eventually my dead
cell phone buzzed in my pocket again. I took it out and looked at the screen.
I'M RIGHT OUTSIDE THE ROOM, the message said.
I felt a slight jostling of the Room bobbing in the water, heard something
moving around outside on top. A new message appeared.
I'VE CLIMBED ABOARD.
I looked up. There was a fumbling sound at the hatch.
Ears straining, I barely dared to breathe. Suddenly, the hatch flew up, and
I gazed in horror at the aperture. For a moment there was only blackness. Then
the face appeared, quick as a spider in a web. It looked down into the Room, a
great white bulbous head with a tiny, emotionless mouth and shiny, hairless
skin, black almond eyes dark as the furthest depths of space.
POST 11
(ZEN'S JOURNAL)
There's an area in Southern Humbaba called Tumik. It's the
like extra-Hippie part of the county, which right there says more than can
ever be said. Turns out Tumik is the Yupa word for alien, as in outer space. Cave
paintings found in the area tell it all. Pictures of flying saucer-type things
drawn on the cave walls by the Yupa thousands of years ago. The proof that the
planet has been visited for as long as our species has been around is
everywhere. The alien I saw told me to call it Tumik, but it didn't say it with
a message on my dead cell phone. This time, it told me . . . in my mind.
Tumik told me lots of things sitting cross-legged on a mound near the lake,
perhaps thirty yards away, where I could see the Tripper Room bobbing
between sandstone formations, its happy Hippie tie-dye glow a reassuring
presence. The little white limbs and body, so child-like, so doll-like,
lacked clothing, lacked visible gender traits. Probably my own
gender bias made me perceive the alien as a he. His pitiless
slit of a mouth remained immobile while words creepily incongruous with the
pasty diminutive form issued into my mind like an unwanted link dropped into
Facebook feed.
I'm glad to meet you at last, Tumik said inside my mind.
"Thank you," I said aloud--quite calmly, I thought. "But I don't
understand."
I've been following you.
"Following me?"
Your blog. Lost Coasters. You cut wood. On which to place beverages.
"That's right. You have a computer?"
No.
"But you can get online?"
Yes.
"Well, how?"
A thin, doll-like index finger gently tapped the big white head.
As with so many other things in life, I have to say, sitting down talking with
an alien didn't exactly make time stop. Like when I went to New York City and
wasn't hugely overwhelmed by the skyscrapers. Having seen movies, it
just wasn't that much of a shock. Plus though, I think Tumik exerted some sort
of sedative-effect that calmed me, mentally, and helped to make me feel real
mellow, very fine, you know, like everything was all right.
So I sat down there, deep in the dark, somewhere west of Darrow's Bend, on the
Avenue of the Giants, in Humbaba County, California, and beheld the ancient
alien, pale and puny, deliver unto me revelations. Sometimes it was just Tumik's
voice in my head. Other times it was a whole bunch. A cacophony of
Tumiks revealed what I somehow understood was the story of the universe. But it
was also the story of Tumik's people. I sat before Tumik a good long while,
seeing the unknowable. When the absolute blackness of the great unblinking oval
eyes started to unnerve me, Tumik's vast psychic energy--infinitely more
evolved than our own--manifested as a visible emanation, an astral avatar, if
you will. I had recently seen the silent version of
Faust. Sensing this,
I suppose, Tumik chose the form of Emil Jannings as Mephistopheles. This
reminded me then and still does now of certain spiders which mimic
the scent of ants in order to blend right in and gobble up all the eggs.
Mesphistopheles stood up from Tumik and leered, the alien's wadded little body
so still he looked dead. The black satin-clad manifestation revealed, capering
in a manner superficially deferential, a starry story the wonder of which
exceeds description, yet again, this time pertaining to the redwood land of
Humbaba County, and how there's this whole unseen world living underground.
Problem was,
Faust being a silent film, Mephistopheles lacked audio.
Inside that pale little dead bug shell of a body, Tumik must have sensed he was
losing me as an audience. The alien's second-choice for an astral avatar with
whom I might feel at ease proved more successful. Stepping behind some
sandstone, Mephistopheles disappeared.
Creak, creak.
The unmistakable sound of a rocking chair. I turned around and saw, bathed in
unnatural light, the figure of--there could be no mistake--Mark Twain, rocking
back and forth in a rocker, lit pipe held contemplatively in hand, as though he
were taking in the evening from the front porch. In the back of my mind
I knew that the alien was still sitting across from me in the dark. But
what I saw was Mark Twain and a chair. The chair looked real enough. Some
instinct, perhaps, told me not to go over and touch it. Either that or the alien.
Twain puffed his pipe and talked about toxic magic.
"Looking for resources that could get harvested from the planet over the
long-term, you understand, the travelers found a form of energy
unknown," he soliloquized. "The energy occurred naturally, deep
in the planet's core."
Puff, puff.
"So the travelers stuck around. They harvested the resource,
and stayed a spell."
Puff, creak. "Untold
generations passed. Eventually, the power broke down. Went rotten. New forms of
energy were sought"--
puff, creak--"and found, but the
effectively magical products of a far-advanced science eventually broke down
into the biosphere. That was a mistake."
Puff, puff. Creak.
"Unless of course it wasn't. You see, prior to that--long prior, when the
travelers first found the planet--the original visitors had in their craft
with them strange cargo, which escaped, and which the visitors were unable to
ever recover. These beings are known by some as rock spirits, tree
spirits, water spirits. Some are apt to help, and some are apt to hurt.
All depends how they're treated. Probably they just want to be left alone.
Trouble is, all the toxic magic leaked into the biosphere. It causes such
strange things, presents so many uncontrollable long-term side-effects"--
puuufff--"potentially,
it's a fatal poison to the nature of reality itself."
This proved very disturbing to me. I felt bummed, big-time. "But isn't
there any hope in preserving existence?"
"There is a way." Mark Twain leaned forward in his chair, his big
hair making him look like Beethoven or God. "Your only hope is to put out
the proper healing vibration. Use your own natural psychic energy, boy. Be at
peace! Act decent! Practice renewable sustainability. In fine"--
puuuuffff--"turn
Hippie."
I had to process that.
"You mean just me?"
"Not just you."
"So--I really do need to be clear with this--to save existence itself, we
all need to go Hippie?"
"Many as you can get, anyway. The more authentic, the better. Really,
anything less than full Hippie puts out the wrong vibration and thereby
contributes to the disintegration of reality."
Mark Twain tapped out his pipe and got up from his chair. We took a little
stroll through the caves. Seemed short to me. There was a narrow trail
alongside a steep sheer rock slope. Twain waved a flickering light like a torch
which I couldn't quite see. I saw rocks tumble over the edge of the trail and
fall away without a sound. The trail narrowed to a dead end. I wasn't too
happy about being led there like that, and I liked it even less when the light
went out. But then a sound grew in the blackness. The next thing I knew, unseen
hands shoved me toward what I thought was my death. I fell through empty air
for a second and landed on something that felt like the back of some furred
beast which roughly rose. It was all I could do to hold on as the beast took
flight, and I held on for my life, unable to see in the blackness at all.
Then suddenly I saw that my mysterious flying mount had flapped out of some
high and lonely mountain fissure, exiting the caves and entering the open air
of evening under a star-splashed sky. I didn't realize I had fallen asleep
until I awoke outdoors early in the morning, and only then realized that the
beast I rode was a horrendously gigantic bat, with a head bigger than a horse's.
Long dark fur was all over my clothes. I had wound up in the Tumik area of
SoHum, miles and miles from Darrow's Bend. I managed to hitch a couple rides
home. A few hours after I got back, I found out I'd been gone for six months.
POST 12
(FACEBOOK MESSAGES
BETWEEN ZEN MENDOSA AND RORA HEARN)
ZEN:
You there?
RORA:
ur alive!
ZEN:
Indeed.
RORA:
where the hell hv u bin
ZEN:
I need to see you.
RORA:
alright
i
thot we were suposed 2do that b4
ZEN:
I thought so, too.
RORA:
what happend?
ZEN:
That needs to be in person.
RORA:
oh really
is
that wht this needs to be?
now
after 6gotohellmonths?
is
that what?
jus
messsin with ya babe
name
whn n whre
ZEN:
!
How about that same
place?
Where we were going to
meet.
Tomorrow at 2:00?
RORA:
wud 10 b ok?
ZEN:
Yep! See you there!
I'll be there!
RORA:
see ya: )
(ZEN'S JOURNAL)
I find I keep doodling tHUMB A BAt all over the place.
It was almost Halloween when the quake hit, and it's about May Day now. Seems
like May was just recent. Because it was! It was only six months ago! Where the
hell did the time go? It doesn't seem possible it could be more than a few days
since I last saw Rora. Still, I've seen on Facebook all the pictures she's
uploaded. Not many. Only forty-five. But that's a huge number for her. There's
no question that six months has passed. How?
Sure would like to get the Tripper Room back.
I like how tHUMB A BAt looks like two tombstones on either side of
"HUMBABA" as much as it also looks like "thumb a bat,"
which I did when I caught a ride on one.
I'll see Rora in a few hours. If she shows. And she will. Need that time to
clean up the yard a bit more, I guess. Wash the bedding. I guess. I just don't
see that many people anymore. Amazingly, no one seems to have much noticed I
had ever even left.
(LATER)
Got back from the river. Rora showed up. She happened to bring along Travis.
They're just friends, of course.
Grass had grown up all around Rozinante. The river rose high enough last winter
(sure feels weird saying that--"last winter") that it rusted my poor
old Pinto's underbelly. Plus a bunch of driftwood hit it, all mashed-up with
dank dead grass and muddy twigs. I'd gotten there first on my mountain bike. I
figured Rora would bring her pickup and save me the climb back home. But I knew
that wouldn't happen the second I saw her walking toward me with that jaunty
little stain, Travis.
I resented having to go through the motions. Of course I didn't want her to
bring someone else along. And she knew it. That's why she did it. I wanted to
ask her why she never showed up! I wanted to tell her everything that happened.
But I couldn't. Not with that stain lingering. I still can't believe she would
do that to me. In the big scheme of things, is six little months really so
goddam long? Man, I wanted her on my side, listening and helping and being
there for me, same as I would be for her. And I sure as hell wouldn't bring
anybody else along. I still don't feel right at all. I'm numb. Stunned.
And even though I did my best to be polite, she didn't give me a lick of credit
for that. Far freaking from it.
"So how long were you like gone for, anyway?" she said. As if she
didn't know. She said so on Facebook, for crying out loud. She'd raised her
voice enough to include the stain. She didn't say it loud, she just didn't say
it to me. Everything she said was more for that stain's benefit, with me
practically there on display.
"I thought we'd have a chance to talk alone," I couldn't help but
say. The stain's agitated body language had me ready to start throwing down.
Rora could see I was about to flatten him. She knows I would, too. Even the
stain knew it, but he felt protected by her. Which he kind of was.
The mosquitoes were thick around Rozinante. When you looked close, you saw a
tiny, ankle-high world of little hopping bugs in the driftwood debris. God, how
I longed for the mountain to open again. I wanted to show her where I'd been. I
wanted to show her what happened. I wanted to ask her about her year. What
happened to us? Where did the time go? There was no way I could tell Rora about
the giant bat. Well, not bat exactly. Close enough, though. Anyway, the
mountain didn't open. It wasn't just pretty awkward. Meeting with Rora and
Travis was rotten beyond belief.
Outside of all that, things have gotten badly fascist. Local business is taking
a beating like nothing I've ever seen. Looks like Local Motion Days got
co-opted by corporate interests after all.
Grove revelers chucked marshmallows soaked in glow-in-the-dark multicolor dye
back and forth at each other last night. I can see the dimly glowing remains
even now.
POST 13
I saw my little white alien friend again. Rather, Tumik's psychic
projection. He showed up to remind me of my mission. The actual bulbous-headed,
almond-eyed being was probably meditating down in some subterranean cave, tiny
wadded body pale and still as a bug in a sill. Being a million years more
evolved, Tumik used psychic energy the likes of which no human mind can fathom.
I had picked up a copy of
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Tumik's
projection appeared as Dr. Gonzo.
"What you . . . don't realize," the good doctor observed, lurching to
my house in the dusty shade of day, motor function clearly compromised by any
number of substances, "is how vitally important it is you stay focused on
your mission!"
The evening was early and the doctor's visit unexpected. He wore running
shorts, tennis shoes, and a Hawaiian shirt, with a visor on his beaming head
and a long-stemmed cigarette-holder in his teeth. I could see his eyes
regarding me from the depths of tan aviator glasses. He looked and
sounded exactly like Johnny Depp doing Hunter Thompson, so to speak. I had seen
the movie recently, too, so everything was nice and fresh for Tumik to tap.
"Listen dammit! You've got work to do! You've got Hippies to make! Go on!
Yah, boy, yah! You realize this is to save
existence itself now, don't
you? Remember!"
"Geez, now you've got me wondering if I really can even trust you."
"You better quit kiddin' boy. You think the fabric of the universe
unraveling is funny? What's wrong with you? My god, have you gone totally
psychotic on me? Is the pressure of your mission already proving too
much?"
"Do you realize how incredible it is that Rora Hearn is the only human
being on the planet to follow the blog?"
"Ye cats. He's off his rocker."
"You know what's even more bizarre than finding an alien, is the lack of
anyone caring about it. I can write with impunity."
The Doctor's bald head looked increasingly white, I noticed, as we walked over
to the old picnic table, or rather what was left of it, up in the tall grass
under some tall gray tan oaks leaning. I was lucky enough to come into
some money several years ago and bought a fixer-upper and a few acres from a
friend. I've put a lot of time on it, but a half a year of being left untended
didn't help a bit. Dr. Gonzo's eyes, too, were awfully dark and looked less
human every time I happened to look away and then look back.
"You're ticked no one follows your blog?"
"Yes. Yes I am. I'm ticked. The world is falling apart--even existence
itself. What we need is a gigantic paradigm-shift. But what chance have I
got of spreading the good Hippie word of peace and love and the natural world
if even my writing about meeting an alien, recording the whole journey, isn't
enough to get somebody to follow a damn blog?"
"Are you sure you have the right gadget set up?"
"Of course I'm sure. I think so. What do you mean?"
Well, long story short, we went inside and took a look at my blog here. I don't
know. There might have been some gadget issue in the design feature when the
blog became set up.
Maybe I shouldn't write with impunity after all.
(ZEN'S JOURNAL)
Right now, everything feels disturbingly like Consuelo all over again. First
Rora didn't show up--just like Consuelo. Then when she finally showed up, it
wasn't like she actually did. Had to bring that little stain with her.
"Travis." How can there be any hope for existence itself when there
isn't any hope for even two people? Some broad and a Bigfoot, oh hell yeah,
they can make it work. Two of them will get married and buried, side-by-side,
hand-in-hand, every damn time. I bet if she watched some made-for-TV
movie about it she'd get deeply emotional at the wild romance of it all.
Tears for Hecuba.
Buried hand-in-hand.
POST 14
The redwoods grasp reality. Firm roots clutching earth. Redwoods know about
duration. Redwoods get groovier as they continue growing, and coast redwoods
get the highest. The oldest ones are the most twisted.
Bud and I hooked up at a grove on the Avenue of the Giants and got to talking
about Bigfeet while I looked around for limbs to chop into coasters, then headed
to his place with my mountain bike in the back of his truck, kaleidoscopic
multicolor peace signs in the clouds continually glowing.
What with the window down and Bud's muffler screwed up, I couldn't hear half of
what the hell he said. Something he read in the
The Freebie about a guy
in an autogyro pedaling away a few hundred feet up over Humbaba
County and taking pictures of a livid river of pollution, like an
infected wound, behind some power plant or pulp mill or maybe
slaughterhouse. Something about how the guy that took the pictures is busted
for violating the corporation's human rights. He's in a lot of trouble now.
We stopped for gas in Darrow's Bend, where a dude came out whom I recognized
from the Master's program at the university up in Carata back when. He had a
full head of hair the last time I saw him. Now he was sporting a Franklin, and
had that pulled back in a samurai. We talked about Local Motion Days, reminded
as we were by flyers on the telephone pole nearby and and by bumper stickers on
a couple of parked cars. This was all due to the corporate-backed race team,
Team Patriotic. Team Patriotic was the one sponsored by LowCost, Buy 'n'
Large, and some new chain everywhere now called Muy Yum. All of these were
owned by the same source that owned the NARGs, evidently--the National Armed
Resistance to Growers. It got me thinking about the Tripper Room, my own
entry for the three-day race only a couple months off, still trapped
somewhere deep underground. How I missed the bubbling view through the window
underwater, all fiber optic wonder-lit. How I longed to stand aloft on deck
with open hatch, maybe an elbow on the railing, plunked on an authentic wooden
crate, digging the groove with reverberating tunes. Some Stones, some Dead. I
thought of the alien I met underground. I thought of Tumik. Then the dude I'd
been talking to, whose name I can't remember, pulled out this honkin' pair of
shades with big black lenses that looked like huge almond-shaped alien eyes.
And I got to wondering if the dude was even for real. Maybe this was just
another astral avatar of the alien underground watching all the time, requiring
I gather converts, turn people Hippie to put out the positive vibe that will
keep everything together, but all I could think of was...to get her.
Over here Rora and I had walked. Down there by the community corkboard
I had powered a Regal Lager, and she had a veggie wrap. I happened to
mention this to Bud after gassing up, and he started to take off in the truck
without me! With my bike in back! I had to run a little bit to catch up, but I
managed to grab onto the door and get inside.
Bud Masterson played four games for the Raiders. As a scab. Started, though. He
had a dojo in L.A. with ten black belts helping him teach a hundred students.
Sometimes he gets paid to show cops how to shoot. Naturally I told him what the
alien said about my mission. According to Bud, the fabric of reality
disintegrating could hardly be more abundant.
"Listen," Bud said, sitting next to his AR-15 with the gas mask
bong on, eye holes big and alien-like so that I had to wonder if it was really
him, "when you've got people in poverty waving little plastic
flags made in China, while corporations get increased rights and human beings
get theirs stripped, when you've got dehumanization as a way of life, fewer and
fewer with more and more, and more and more with less and less, yeah, I'd say
the time is definitely out of joint."
In my absence I learned they had permits now for miracle marijuana. Bud had
already gotten his miracle marijuana card a few months before. This was a new
strain, so strong, so potent, supposedly it would replace Humbaba County's
financial woes with lucrative
whoas like never before . . .
POST 15
There are permits now for a kind of pot so amazing, it's actually legally
called miraculous. It started with a specific strain developed by the members
of a Hippie commune way out in the hills of Southern Humbaba. Three of the
women gave birth to strange offspring--people with miraculous powers. One of
the boys was born with wings. Fleshy, bat-like skin that folds out--you may
have seen the video of him leaping off the roof of a house and flying around.
One important feature shared by the moms and dads was that they all had body
modification implants. Horns on one dad's head, surgically-grafted to his
skull. The other little boy had antennae. The third, a girl, was born with a
tail. They're all eleven or twelve now. The other thing the moms and dads did was
smoke a lot of pot from a strain they'd made high in the Humbaba mountains,
using the natural spring water.
According to my 111,000 year-old little white friend from outer space, Tumik,
the pot still grown by the same Hippies the same way is steeped in the stuff
that has always made the county unique. Somewhere deep underground in a
nameless cave, the tiny alien's immobile body was as one with the cold wet rock
all round, but his mind--oh, his mind--provided the power of psychic
projection. Tumik's astral avatar made it easier to communicate. Plus I think
he just kind of got off on it. The alien came to me looking like Val Kilmer as
Jim Morrison in full Dionysus-mode.
I was down in a redwood grove looking for branches to cut into coasters when he
showed up with a full head of hair and a beard, a leopard skin around his
substantial waist, a pine cone-tipped staff in one hand, a handheld vaporizer
in the other. He took a sip off of it. I could even smell it. Such was the
power of the alien's mind, I think I actually caught a buzz.
"You're forgetting your
Hamlet, Zen. Remember what the king's ghost
says?"
"Yeah, he says, dude, get some clothes on."
"What's the matter? I'm just a large mammal."
"Dude, seriously. That's gross. You need some clothes, man."
"Remember."
"Oh right, my mission! DAMMIT! I keep forgetting."
"Fate of existence, Zen."
"I know, I know. I need to turn more people Hippie."
"More? How about
some?
Any?"
"Listen, I will get on this. I told you, you have my word. You have my
utmost promise, I will do my faithful best to turn, I don't know,
somebody
Hippie. I'll turn 'em on to the awesome Hippie ways, and that'll help increase
the vibe, the positive vibe we all need to keep the universe from falling
apart. We need to be more like Thoreau, I know. We need to get back to the
land. We need to just say no to corporations, the goddam corporate life of
death running the world into the ground. We need to re-learn ancient ways, ways
of living with the Earth proven to work. We need to think about the people, all
people, really come from the heart, and look for technological solutions to our
invented problems. We need to think of ourselves as a whole, and treat ourself
with compassion, and the bravery of healing. We need a paradigm-shift."
"Take a chill pill, ace."
"Sorry. Got a little carried away."
"All right. It's okay. Hey, at least I see you know your stuff."
"Oh yeah, I've got the basic concepts down. It's just a matter of bearing
down and applying what I know. Trying to save existence and all, you
know, and without even any credit. It's not easy."
"I know, I know. Believe me, I've thought about it. But you've got to
remember your mission."
The more I thought about it, the more I realized, what I needed to do was
get out of the house and really travel around the county. I needed to find
people receptive to increasing their own innate Hippie energy. People open to
the power of peace, the power of love, open to the natural world, to reality.
Did any such people even exist anymore? Or had everybody become totally
brainwashed? This is what I needed to find out. To save the fabric of reality
from unraveling completely, I had to travel in search of Humbaba.
Way I figured, I better take Bud. He was the one with the truck.
I once saw a man with hair plugs on his scalp. Plugs with little stalks
rising out of what looked like too few holes. Like the head of a doll with the
hair torn off. You couldn't help but see the holes. I remember that guy bragged
about how he won every lawsuit he ever waged. And that was years ago.
They've gotten way better at it now. Around Humbaba, it doesn't even have to be
hair. A lot of people get synthetic strands put in, strands that glow based on
body heat. You can adjust them to take different shapes, too. I've seen people
with hair that shimmered like the iridescent multicolor neon bands of tropical
fish. Saw a couple of them outside 2 Dye 4 Designs while we were gassing
up. I had seen Jim inside playing a conga drum in a Santa hat. It was June.
The women with the rippling bands of synthetic hair were unbelievably
hot, youthful-looking, and coldly vibrant in the eyes. This was due to
colored lenses. But the contacts cut down on contact. You can't see the pupils.
All you get is that eerie glow. Silver, today. Supposedly to protect the eyes
from retinal scans now increasingly routine. Pricey, too.
The unattainable pair of unreal women jetted away from me and Bud in the truck
in a way that made me slightly depressed. Not so much because of the
invisibility cloak cast over us by the custom-crafted camper shell on the back
of Bud's truck, redwood shingles and all. Nope. It was because it's depressing
to see people so willingly dehumanized. Those two chicks could've been a
hundred and ten years old, with most of the original parts replaced. They slid
on down the Avenue. We were going the opposite direction, up north to Tertia.
The giant mechanical Bigfoot greeting tourists to Darrow's Bend waved as we
left, I could still see it waving in the side-view mirror half a mile down till
we rounded the bend and took the turnoff to the Hippie Highway. Bud wanted to
cut over to Dreem. There was somebody there he had to see.
Now, Bud's fully legal. Card-carrying and everything. Even these
days though, it isn't always easy to openly discuss the sacred medicine.
By the gods, how far my peoples have come! Unfortunately, when we stopped at a
fountain to load up on spring water there were tons of the ripest, scroungiest
Hippies you ever saw lingering around. Amazingly, I managed to remember my mission.
I realized these were my people--I'm full-blood Hippie, myself--but then I took
another look and had to wonder, to what degree were they my people?
Upon further examination, I concluded these were a bad Hippie breed. Border
folk, of which one sometimes hears. Wild and rangy. I could just see those
suckers didn't have any peace in their heart at all. All they wanted was to get
high.
Back in the truck with the vape going, Bud said I needed to talk with
people, talk with them or I'd never save existence.
"I don't see you getting out there and chatting it up."
"It's not my mission," he said. "I just need to stop off at the
Samanas and head up to Tertia."
He had already taken a sharp left and barreled up a dirt road. Only about a
minute later we were there.
Inside the stately Hippie home of Bud's good friends, everywhere you looked
there was pot. Some totally foxy chick came up. "Welcome, friend,"
she said, taking me by the hand while Bud transferred something into his
backpack. "Here we are all completely legal."
A TV was on in the living room. I could see unhappy heads of pundits behind
her. We were there at the Samanas just long enough to hear. The
pundit-heads talked about the looting of the Treasury. Overwhelmingly,
unreal though it still seems, they all agreed: The looting had been a
good thing.
POST 16
Bud and I saw barely any cars on the highway for miles. In the few we did
pass, most people were staring at their phones. Even the drivers. I texted
Bud this observation. He looked at his screen, then called me a
bad word.
"When are we going to see your alien friend?" Bud suddenly wondered.
I rolled up the window, envisioning opening the passenger door of the truck,
slipping out, and running off of the highway into some saw tooth-lined vale,
sky-high trees towering over a wildly meandering creek. We were in the stretch
between Werman and Riverdell, occasionally able to look down at Mist
River glinting in the distance, spectacular snags limned against the green
of the trees and gray of the tattered and low-hanging fog.
"How the hell should I know?" I said. "I don't have any say over
that."
We were quiet for about a mile. There was a bunch of paper and cans and crap at
my feet. An empty bottle kept rolling around. I could feel myself starting
to get hungry.
"I was thinking you might try summoning."
"What now?"
"I was thinking you might try summoning the alien."
"Summoning? How?"
"You said he appeared to you as Hunter Thompson, right?"
"No, I said he appeared as Johnny Depp playing Dr. Gonzo."
"Whatever. Weren't you reading
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at
the time?"
"Still am. It's right here." I had my copy in a pocket of my jacket
which was next to me on the seat. I pulled it out and flipped it open to the
dog-eared page. I was at the part where they're sitting with the cops at the
convention. Realizing where Bud was going with this, I closed my eyes, touched
the book to my forehead, and started focusing my untapped psychic energy,
wishing and wishing for Tumik to appear.
At first, nothing happened. I kept concentrating on wishing. A couple minutes
passed like that. When lo, as if by a miracle, I withdrew the book from my
forehead and opened my eyes to find a guy with a visor and a Hawaiian shirt
half a mile ahead, standing by the side of the road.
"Slow down," I said, "there he is. Let's pick him up for God's
sake."
The alien's psychic projection hopped into the truck. I sort of politely helped
him along so he could sit in the middle. 'Cause there's no way I was.
Bit of an uncomfortable ride, three dudes jammed in a cab being clownish.
"You realize, of course, all matter is solidified thought," Tumik
said. Bud acted like he couldn't tell it wasn't really Johnny. "Don't mind
Zen," he said. "He's ticked off no one will follow his blog."
Tumik turned to me and asked when was the last time I checked my stats.
Sure enough, a couple of minutes later, there we all were staring at a phone
and driving down the road. I signed in to my blog, then Tumik's astral
avatar showed me how to go into the statistics of how many pageviews the blog's
been getting.
"Hey check it out," I said, "ten in Ireland! Four in Russia. Two
in Japan. Two in Sweden. One in United Arab Emirates. Whole bunch in
Canada."
Bud said, "You're kidding."
"Nope. One in Australia, too. One in Switzerland, one in France, one in
Italy, and one in Germany."
"So you see?" the alien's psychic projection said. "It's not
just Rora."
Rora. The very mention of her name stood out like the Alps in my mind. It was
like being on a walkabout, riding around in Bud's truck. Like dreamtime. But I
knew I had to focus, samurai-like, on my work. Was my trying to save reality
from unraveling a case of just another veritable Vercingetorix? Hey, maybe. But
at least I had an audience. Hope remained. Finally, I felt as though I might
yet be able to get out the good Hippie word, help make that positive vibe to
save everything from falling apart, crumbling like an old maple leaf.
Then I noticed Bud's face. It had turned uncharacteristically ashen. At first I
couldn't figure out what his problem was. Until I saw in the mirror on the
driver's side visor. Bud had the visor folded back against the window and
turned it down for me to see what he had noticed in the rear-view mirror.
The Depp-Gonzo, reflected in the mirror, appeared as Tumik's true alien self.
He was leaning forward, craning his neck to see out the windshield to the sky.
I could see in Bud's mirror the bulbous white head with the shaved-cat skin.
"Wow," the Depp-Gonzo said, seemingly oblivious, long-stemmed
cigarette-holder clamped in his teeth. "A couple of autogyros up there . .
. "
POST 17
We stopped off in Fortville at a Muy Yum, the new Spanish-style chain
everywhere. Had to. Starving. Nowhere else to go. We piled inside and sat down
on hard plastic stucco-colored seats, Bud's face looking vaguely pissed. I
couldn't figure out what this portended until I looked around and realized
everybody else was staring at what they thought was Johnny Depp.
How could I explain that the figure seated next to me wasn't Johnny Depp
publicly reprising his role of Dr. Gonzo, the literary alter-ego of Hunter S.
Thompson, from the Terry Gilliam-directed cult favorite
Fear and Loathing in
Las Vegas, but was in fact a mental manifestation, the psychic projection
of a white, bulb-headed alien with big black almond-shaped eyes, sitting in a
dripping cave miles away, deep underground?
I turned back toward Bud. "Just play it cool," I whispered, barely
mouthing the words.
Bud ignored me and directed his stentorian bass to the group in the booth a few
over behind me. "What the hell are YOU lookin' at?"
It didn't really bother me if people thought Tumik's astral avatar was Johnny
Depp. What worried me was if anyone tried to touch him--would a hand go right
through? To me and Bud he was as real as anything, but how far would this hold
for those whose minds had not been prepared?
I could see people reflected in the windows with plastic trays in their hands,
slowly shuffling forward. In Fortville, TV was central. This was the wrong
crowd to try to traipse Johnny through--even if it wasn't him. I didn't have
time for this shit. I was looking for the heart of Humbaba.
"Hey," I said, hissing to Tumik, "how about to help save
existence you toddle off to the little boy's room over there and disappear
before you start a riot? Holy crud, I can see your true alien self reflected in
the windows--go!"
"What?" Bud interjected. "You're making him leave? Why?"
"He's compromising the mission!"
"I don't care about your damn mission."
"Bud, he has to go."
"No."
"Yes! Go now," I said to the Depp-Gonzo, "go to the bathroom, be
free!"
I could see Bud was thinking about taking a swing. "He's an alien,
dude," I said, just to remind him. "A freakin' alien." I headed
over to the counter, ready to order, not giving a hoot about the zombie-like
crowd. Whatever had to happen, I'd damn sure be getting my tacos first.
Yet everywhere I looked, Medieval-like economic disparity abounded. Certainly
most of the people there could have stepped right out of a Hieronymous Bosch.
In the standard black hoodie one could see the simple peasant of yesterday,
poor in health and education, laden perhaps with bundles of sticks gathered
from behind the castle. Naturally I thought of my own Lost Coaster business,
and strangely decided to see about a sale. I hurried through my order for tacos
with this in mind, in fact.
But of course I'd forgotten about no soliciting. And that no one there could
make any sort of decision, certainly not involving money. The young woman
behind the counter was merely a shift-supervisor. The manager, whose picture I
saw on a plaque by the straws, wouldn't be back till two that afternoon, and
was clearly just a kid, anyway. Somewhere far away, a scented noble sat astride
a freshly washed thoroughbred and raked in global franchise coin for nothing.
Whoever owned the joint had probably never even tried dehydrated Muy Yum taco
product filler.
I took my number and stood off to the side till my order came up. Bud went to
the counter and placed his own order. By his politeness with the young woman I
sensed he was about to get into it with the group at the booth. One among their
number had scuttled off to the bathroom. I noticed that he came back now with
the news of no one else inside.
I told Bud that Tumik had split. He reacted with the thousand-yard stare while
eating his tacos.
Until one of the guys from the other booth came over. I could see his
reflection in the window before he said a word.
"Where'd your friend go?" the guy said.
Bud stood up. He'd finished eating. Only a couple years prior, he ran
his own security business. Turns out, his all-time favorite show was "21
Jump Street." I could see by the gleam in his eye that Bud was about to
lose it. He'd lived under a pier in L.A. for six months. Used to wear his hair
down to his butt. One time, he disarmed a belligerent cop.
No doubt about it. My mission was being compromised. We had to get back to the
truck, away from these prying rubes.
It wasn't just a Mexican standoff, it was a fast food one, too. Suddenly, a
cell phone rang. The guy who'd come over pulled one out of his pocket. "A
Night on Bald Mountain" ring-tone, I noticed. Bud still had his death-look
fixed. Finally the guy on the phone broke Bud's tractor-beam stare, turning
away as though in deep conversation. Situation defused, Bud and I strolled
leisurely out.
I didn't feel like talking about any of it in the truck. It would only serve to
feed Bud's ego. Plus remind him of "21 Jump Street." It dawned on me
that, while I had remembered to try to solicit sales for my business, I had
completely forgotten to try to turn anybody Hippie in hopes of saving reality
from unraveling.
Pulling out of Muy Yum, we saw the dudes from the booth flocking out together.
They all had on their windbreakers now. You couldn't miss the insignia on the
back of the jacket. Fellow Local Motion Days competitors. The
corporation-hugging ringers symbolizing the system that runs the world into the
ground.
We'd just met Team Patriotic.
POST 18
Driving through the county in search of it, one sees the many places where
the corporate piranha were loosed. All those little wind-up machines the system
uses. Based on the same concept as the unmanned plane and the virus, really.
Those corporate piranha get let loose, click speedily and sneakily over the
land, and strip the life they eat right down to the mall, so all that's left is
the bare white remains of creepy corporate crap where there used to be a
thriving community. Same basic thing happened to the Indians. And hey, at least
plastic trees in casinos don't require real water. The way that stuff gets
polluted, nobody should have to mess with it.
The tree line high overhead looked like the broken comb of the gods. By night
it would be black, silhouetted against the sky, and the psychedelic neon rivers
furrowing the land with multicolor blood that run would cast a radiating glow
visible to the stars, if the stars hadn't already died, and ever could have
seen.
Entering Egeria Bud slowed the pickup to forty. Days of Daly's and Bill
Beasley's were gone with the pulp mill wind. The KVIQ TV Channel 6 TV station,
so long a part of the local community, was now an empty building on a corner,
boarded-up with graffiti-littered plywood and showing ragged holes with smashed
windows like the rotting sockets of a giant corpse on the street. And in the
trailer park beyond, boobs watching tube, caught in poverty, desperate for
identity, asserted their approval for their own subjugation most vociferously,
per the propaganda from the corporate-owned stations that put the local one out
of business, screaming in their dilapidation, "Go, team!" through
uninsured toothless gums and waving little plastic flags outsourced to China.
We kept a low-profile all the way through town, smoke stacks making things very
Blade Runner-esque, Bud bringing his truck up to fifty-five almost for
half a mile before letting it settle down to a natural fifty, mandatory speed
through the revenue corridor. A cop parked behind a bush zapped cars going by
with his radar gun. I wasn't worried. I checked out the eucalyptus while we
rounded the bay.
Ahead to our right the university loomed, but we took a left and headed up
14th, crossing the overpass and going slowly through dreamy streets thick with
students for several blocks until we reached a roundabout and gradually took a
left. The green house on the corner was another place where I had lived.
It was dejecting to find Das Bagels closed. There were some nice sticky garlic
bagels and a fat Guinness each only a couple blocks over at the Carata Co-op,
undoubtedly. But the parking was horrendous. People stood around in the streets
like Carata was downtown Calcutta.
"You have to wonder," Bud said negotiating the Town Square in his
shingle truck, "how every panhandler has a dog."
Getting back on the highway, we continued on north, as per the plan. Up in
Tertia there were folks wearing buckskin jackets and buckskin vests with long,
beaded fringe. There would be no retinal scans. I made sure to keep these thoughts
to myself, so as not to betray anything to the cameras overhead at the
streetlights that we passed
We pulled into Tertia sometime shortly after four with huge Humbaba
rainclouds pouring over the ocean and the land looking like the start of
"Dark Shadows," great gray waves crashing on the shore. We'd arrived
at the home of our host. I could hear the Beatles playing as I exited the
truck. They said to roll up. Roll up, for their mystery tour. We were just
getting out, but it still worked.
A dude with a cammo hat stood waiting. "Rainy," he said. "You're
right on time. How was the drive?"
"Wonderful," said Bud. "How are you?"
"Quite well, sir. How are you?"
"I'm quite well as well. I think you'll be extremely pleased with what
I've brought."
"Really?"
"Really."
"Well, let us retire for a bit to the shop. Who's your friend?"
I'd almost forgotten I was even there. I could hardly take my eyes off the
spread. In the summer rain especially. Honestly, it's the most I ever felt like
Ronald Colman in my life. Either that or Peter Sellers in
I Love You, Alice
B. Toklas.
Entering the house was like walking into the '70s. Early-'70s. Maybe even
late-'60s . . .
POST 19
I got along with Bud's buddy with the ocean view up in Tertia just
dandy when right away he had a boat-load of nice things to say about my blog
here. Turns out, Bud told the guy after the first couple posts that he should
give my blog a read. Bud's buddy said he was hooked on the first post he saw
and has been checking it out ever since.
"As a first-person narrative," he said, "I think it's right up
there with
The Diary of Anne Frank and
Invisible Man."
We sat down at the cammo hat dude's computer. Gotta say, I never did get his
name. I think Bud said in the truck on the drive up, but I wasn't paying
attention. Then I think he said it again when we got out, but I just couldn't
quite hear it in the rain. And after I started talking to the guy, and got
along with him so well, especially what with his help and all, I never could
bring myself to ask his name.
"Here's what your problem is," he said. I remember that part
distinctly. The rest was something about a Feedburner address, whatever that
means. I really don't know. Computers aren't my thing.
"The blog started out," I said, "as a record of my making a
hallucimotion for Local Motion Days and as a forum for marketing my redwood
coasters. I mean, I've got a college degree. As long as I have to go around
finding sticks to survive, I might as well at least put my education to work
somehow."
"I think the conflict in your life makes for a pretty good read," he
said.
"Wow, thanks!"
"I mean, the installments are usually brief enough that I can take the
time to read them. And I love anything to do with the Lost Coast. You know what
your blog reminds me of is Dostoyevsky. Ever read
Notes From Underground?"
"Years ago, I think."
"And I see a little bit of Steinbeck, too. Very poetic."
"Hey, if you're interested in the coasters, I've got a couple sets in the
truck. Eight bucks for half a dozen, but I've got two sets I'll let you have
for fifteen."
"One dozen redwood coasters for fifteen dollars? Let's see them."
So off I scrambled, excited to make a tidy sale, noticing on the walls along
the hall framed photos and flyers proclaiming Redwood Heights Tree Tours, a
weird catwalk of ropes and bridges up in the trees of a redwood grove. Bud's
buddy showed up in most of the shots as a guide.
The guy damn-sure had a nice place. Lots of brown, yellow, and orange decor.
Like walking around in the Brady Bunch house and the writer's house in
A
Clockwork Orange all in one.
Outside, the rain had lulled. It was dusk now, setting sun obliterated by the
overcast sky. Somebody, I couldn't help thinking, somebody in Bangladesh
checked out my blog. Bangladesh. Bloggles the mind.
I grabbed the coasters from the truck and hustled back just as somebody else
was showing up. I saw the headlights coming, but I went on in anyway, not
knowing who it was, and not needing whoever it was to witness a coaster
transaction.
Back downstairs in the house, Bud and his buddy were talking about
genetically-engineered snails big as small dogs, and a skateboard powered
entirely by a brainwave-reading helmet.
"Whoever's wearing the helmet visualizes a point in the distance becoming
nearer, and the damn thing goes."
They were both too busy talking for me to properly conduct a sale. I put the
two sets of coasters on a table, probably somewhat glumly, just as Bud's
buddy's wife and her girlfriend came in. Both were very good-looking. Especially
the wife's girlfriend, who wore the most wonderful mini-skirt and had--it took
me a good while examining to fully perceive--not Nylons on, but light-tan
hosiery tattooed onto her skin, a perfectly convincing dark band appearing
midway up her thigh. I wondered how far the tattoo extended down--to her toes?
I tried to imagine how that would look while we all listened to Joe Walsh and
shot the fat on the deck.
Bud's buddy wound up pulling out a copy of Joseph Campbell's
Myths to Live
By. The girlfriend read from the chapter titled "Zen." She read
from the part about how the Buddha had "so given of himself to the world
that there was no one there" right when Joe Walsh's "A Life of
Illusion" was on! I couldn't help but think about Tumik's psychic projections,
the ancient alien's astral avatars, and I wondered how best to spread the word
to keep reality from unraveling, and how in even greater display, considering
the big ongoing picture, reality unraveling could possibly look.
POST 20
Checking out the beer bottles standing all around--some still
unopened--started reminding me of stalagmites. I couldn't help but think about
the underground, the way light plays shined up into scalloped crevices and
crevasses, all the monolithic cracks and fissures wavering high overhead down
deep.
It was around midnight before Bud and I finally got out. I asked Bud if he
needed me to drive. Bud just arched an eyebrow in mild surprise by way of
reply.
The late drive back passed dark and quiet. We retraced our journey as if
retracted back into a dream, arriving home to the sight of the giant mechanical
Bigfoot at the Darrow's Bend turnoff a little after one a.m. We booked on down
the Avenue of the Giants to the dirt road leading uphill that winds by my
property, keeping an eye out for deer crossing the moon-splashed Avenue on
their way down to Mist River for a drink.
I told Bud he could hang out and crash, but he said he had some things to do in
the morning. The wooden camper with the shingled roof squeaked in back of the
pickup all the way down the hill. Then the soft sounds of the summer night
returned. Invisible crickets hiding all around with tiny alien eyes resumed
communication.
Around nine o'clock that morning, I was out by my band saw running a bunch of
limbs when I saw a group of people coming toward me whom I instantly took to be
tourists. I thought I caught some German from a distance and immediately spoke
up.
"Ich heize Zen," I yelled. "Was machen sie am wochenende?"
Looking back on it, I guess it was natural enough that they should turn right
around and head back down the hill like they did. I guess the equivalent would
be if I was wandering around a German forest and saw some local savage
surrounded by sticks and blades wondering in broken book-learned English what I
liked to do on my weekends.
I turned the band saw back on. Grabbed a branch, lined it up, made a couple
cuts. Sliding a couple of raw redwood coasters off the edge and into the box
below, I thought about Rora, the two of us together, together in the Tripper
Room. How we made them colored underwater lights shine.
It was hard to believe that, somewhere underground, the Tripper Room was still
trapped, bobbing moored in some subterranean river rife with toxic magic from a
pre-cataclysmic age. I thought about Tumik. The alien's bulbous head, white as
a tapeworm, was firmly lodged in my mind's eye.
"Tumik," I whispered, running another branch through the screaming
saw's high shrill grind. "Come to me, Tumik," I whispered, "I
need you now. Come in, Tumik. Tumik, do you read me?"
About twenty minutes later, while I was taking a break over at the picnic table
with some cheese and some bread, out of the woods stepped a quite recognizable
dude. I smiled and yelled out, "Hey, I'm surprised you're not Johnny
Depp!"
Werner Herzog came over. The German tourists, of course, plus my having watched
Little Dieter Needs to Fly and
Rescue Dawn back-to-back over the
course of a few nights with dinner. These things were fresh in my mind.
"I see you've finally bothered to respond to my thoughts," I added as
Werner Herzog approached. I was growing to enjoy the underground alien's
perfectly convincing mental manifestations.
"A fellow can really get lost in these woods," he said, looking and
sounding exactly like the famous filmmaker. "The trees here are so
big."
"I'm having trouble staying focused on my mission," I said. "I
mean, I want to keep existence from falling apart as much as anybody. It's just
so hard to find a way to turn people on to . . . you know . . . " I
trailed off, shaking my head.
"The magic power that reunites?" Werner said, pulling out an e-pen.
"Well, yeah. How to make the good vibrations grow, you know?"
"Groovy!"
"Wow. That is so convincing. It looks exactly like you're really here. In
front of me right now. Exhaling. Coughing, and coughing. I don't know, I just
feel the weight of the world, you know?"
Towering greenery rose high above meandering fog. I had The Flying Burrito
Brothers on. After a few moments, Werner spoke.
"I vividly remember, when making the film
Aguirre, Wrath of God,
consuming a meal made with the fermented intestines of an anaconda. It was a
sacred and mysterious preparation and it gave me visions beyond my wildest
dreams, visions which haunt me and impel me to this day. Indeed, to this very
moment."
"Basically, I have to do what the Beatles did. I have to turn the world on
to peace, love, and rock n' roll."
"A lot of people mistake me for Pete Townsend." Werner took another
hit on his pen.
"I'm starting to get the feeling you're not actually a 111,000 year-old
alien sending out an astral avatar from deep underground."
"I must confess, I haven't listened to the Who in years. Has anyone else
passed by? I got lost from my group...”
POST 21
(FACEBOOK EXCHANGE BETWEEN
ZEN MENDOSA AND RORA HEARN)
RORA:
u there?
ZEN:
I am.
RORA:
saw your light on.
ZEN:
Okay.
RORA:
come on zen
trying
to apologize
ZEN:
What for?
RORA:
not showing up alone
as
if you didnt kno
ZEN:
I appreciate that.
Why did you bring him?
RORA:
started takin classes at junior college
last
jan. met him in comparative religion
ZEN:
Why did you bring him?
RORA:
zen you were gone a olong itme
i
made a friend
but
theres nothing there with him
AT
ALL
there
never has been and i dont kno
why
i took him with me
ZEN:
Well, when can you and I meet alone?
RORA:
how about tonite
i
can come by your place
how;s
6?
ZEN:
Six with you sounds great.
RORA
c ya! : )
ZEN:
Zen out
(ZEN'S JOURNAL)
I have to wonder if it was really even Rora I messaged with. Supposedly. I
guess I'll find out. Oh well.
(LATER)
The sun hung over the sky like a humongous coaster, and the trees were giant
beer bottles with limbs when Rora showed up at six. I told her how I'd met
Werner Herzog, that he was in Humbaba making a documentary on the autogyro dude
in trouble for finking on big business dumping illegal pollutants. All Rora did
the whole time I talked about this though was flip her hair around and smile
with a lot of eye-contact.
"Sounds interesting," she said. She came toward me smiling softly.
Smiling knowingly.
"Woman," I said, setting down a Regal Lager on one of my own
coasters, "you have won me with your words."
Old-timers tell of the blood-curdling cries of the Bigfeet at night, eerie
yells weirdly rolling throughout the moonlit forest. But that's nothing
compared to the way we sounded. The spirits of our hairy ape-like ancestors were
shocked, shocked as they watched.
When our spasms had subsided, and freshly washed we lay abed wrapped in a
post-coital glow, I thought about the world, and felt as though there might be
hope.
Then the phone rang. It was my neighbor, an old codger called Cooter. Robert
Coot's got a parcel of land adjacent to mine. He called up with a very strange
story, something about his television set left running.
"Friggin'-a dude," I said, "it's late."
I was butt-naked there in bed with Rora sacked-out next to me. Absentmindedly observing Sluggo
move around as though with a life of its own, I asked Cooter if it couldn't
wait until morning.
"Zen?" Rora mumbled. "What is it?"
"Cooter," I said.
"Oh honey, I'm tired."
"No. My neighbor. Something's wrong with Cooter's tube. Don't worry about
it. You go back to sleep."
When she turned over on her side, and pulled a knee up to her breasts, I
confess I actually tried for more. But she's grumpy when she's tired, I found.
Besides, there was something trippy going on and I had to go.
I stumbled over to the bathroom and tried my best to take a leak, but such was
the residual state of my ardor, even leaning forward parallel with the floor
was a dangerous proposition. I thought about baseball. Hit play on the boom box
in arm's reach and listened to The Humblebums. Billy Connolly sang
"Mother."
When that did the trick, I got myself together and hustled over to Cooter's on
my ATV.
Seems Cooter had decided to save himself a trip to the dump, plus win a secret
victory in his battle against environmentalists, by chucking his old TV in a
hole in the ground.
Standing on my horseless chariot I powered up the rut-scarred road still
trying to figure what Cooter meant when he said "it came back out
again." Sure didn't sound like he meant he was drunk. Maybe not
everybody's willing to go tearing off to help out a fat old guy always in
overalls talking about trains, but the man makes a damn fine strudel.
Coming around down the hill onto Cooter's spread I saw him hustling around with
a rifle looking every which way all at once in the manner of someone trying to
avoid a sneak attack. The closer I got, the more he looked like Elmer Fudd
doing an impersonation of John Belushi. Even the pair of handcuffs dangling
from Cooter's wrist would have been funny if not for the rifle in his hands and
the hollow look in his eyes.
"It was just an old goddam TV, I tell ya!"
The words came out of him, not necessarily directed at me.
"It was a Sylvania! Just an old black and white. Never gave nobody no
trouble! Always kept to itself."
"Cooter, why don't you put down that rifle and tell me what exactly's got
your Osh Koshes in a bunch."
"Threw it away," was all he said. ""Threw the goddam thing
away."
"Down a hole in the ground, right?"
"Damn right I did!"
"So what?"
"So it climbed back out, that's what! Goddam thing held me hostage! But I
got away!
I got away! We gotta kill it--we gotta find it, gotta kill
it--"
Over by the wood shed, a stick cracked.
"There it is!" Cooter screamed. Pointing his rifle, he tried to fire,
and looked utterly befuddled when his finger pulled the trigger and nothing
happened. This much I could see quite clearly, but couldn't see who or what it
was over by the wood shed until it sprang into view.
The television bobbed five or six feet in the air, screen displaying that
evidence of the Big Bang which we call static. The set seemed to float toward
us at first. The static stopped as the set approached. The image of the flag
appeared, in color, followed by the national anthem. Didn't faze me a bit, but
Cooter stood transfixed. I sure as hell wasn't. Especially not when the TV
crept out of the shadows and into a patch of light cast on the dry and dusty
ground.
It was as though the TV had a hole in the bottom that must have oozed something
shiny and black that lengthened and sprouted four limbs roughly equal to the
body in wrist-thick girth. Nimble as a deer it crossed a distance of perhaps
some twenty-odd yards toward us before I swept up a big rock and chucked it
pretty darn hard right into the screen. But instead of busting through a bunch
of glass like it should have, the rock thudded off of the thing with a sound
such as a mallet might make striking a thick steak. Stopped it, anyway.
The programming changed on impact. Suddenly the screen displayed what I
instantly recognized to be Goldie Hawn from "Laugh-In" in close-up,
having just said, "Sock it to me!"
Somehow, this thing had handcuffed Cooter. Kept him hostage who knows how long
and did who knows what. The dogs wouldn't go near it.
Then like a cornered rat the TV leaped at me and slashed with misshapen claws
that hissed through the air like whipcord. The screen showed some pundit's face
I'd seen at the Samanas saying how good it was for the country that the Treasury
got looted, and how the poor were so lazy, and college was for snobs, and how
union workers are such terrorizing bullies, and corporations are people, and
whatever it was that the aliens had left so long ago in the land, when it came
into contact underground with the old man's TV thrown down a hole, in showing
the face of that fascist shill, it made one hell of a stupid mistake
with me.
As its arm swept past I stepped in with a left hook to the side of the set that
sent the TV sprawling. What that TV didn't know is, my older brother used to be
a streetfighter. He's all over YouTube in DrunkFights. And he was doing that in
his forties.
Just like hitting a side of beef. Didn't feel like a TV at all. For a
second there it tried to rally. I recognized the close-up of John Saxon's face
from an episode of "The Six Million Dollar Man" filling the TV's
screen.
I knew I had to get in close. Chasing the TV, dictating the fight, kept it
off-balance. I bulled in past a couple of gimpy swipes from the claws, and
landed several blows rapid-fire undistracted by shots from
Rocky and
Raging
Bull. Even when it spoke directly to me through lines of TV-dialogue I only
pounded and pounded until I thought I'd about killed it.
It staggered away, looking pathetic, showing scenes from
2001, saying it
could feel it. That TV wasn't going anywhere. Like a wounded bull in Madrid
before the final blow, the television tottered. Every tearful scene you ever
saw in your life flashed across the screen. All the close-up faces of actors in
great moments of dying. Me, I was immune. Hell, I was the movie reviewer for
The
Freethinker for years when I lived in Carata.
The only thing that made me pause was the TV's posture. It looked
more than anything in the world like it was taking a major dump. And indeed,
that's exactly what it did. Quickly the misshapen claws retrieved the
shiny black geometric result. Like a tiny monolith--it was a remote! The TV
pointed it at Cooter and clicked away.
"Them poor! They deserve what they get for it!"
The TV shook the remote, hit it a couple times, then tried again.
"Latinos are illegal!"
"Cooter! You stupid idiot! The TV's controlling your mind!"
"Global warming is a hoax!"
The sneering face of the pundit on the screen caught my eye while the TV clicked
away. There was an axe in a round of wood nearby. While the TV worked Cooter
into an apoplectic frenzy, I ran to the round, grabbed the handle, plus the
metal lid of a garbage can nearby, and raised the axe with an inarticulate
oath. The TV ran, and I gave chase.
I chased that TV all over the place. Man, if only I could have caught it and
taught it. Taught it the ways of peace and love. But every chance it got, the
damn thing kept zapping people. It tried to zap me, and I accidentally dropped
the axe trying to avoid that while using the lid as a shield. I chased it right
down onto the Avenue of the Giants and it zapped some people going by in one
direction, then again some more people going in the other, everybody with their
windows down.
I finally caught up with it down at the river. Ran it down in the shallows as
it tried to cross. I could feel its lithe limbs ineffectually resist as I
wadded its arms around what must have been its waist. This was like holding
three wriggling wrists. But the legs kicking couldn't reach me, and neither
could the TV's claws. I kept lifting it up and smashing it down on a rock in
the river. Meaty wet sounds of its head meeting stone were accompanied by
strange crunches within. I swung that sucker like a sledge. The thin veneer of
civilization had fallen away like a robe. At last, when I was sure that it was
dead, I raised my face to the starlit sky and might well have given vent to a
primordial cry had there not appeared, in intermittent glimpses between the
trees, the vision of a man with streaming white hair booking along on a Segway.
I was pretty sure it was only Tumik, and not the real Billy Connolly. I did
make sure to ask, though.
"Look at that now," the mental manifestation of the ancient alien
exclaimed. "Would you look at what you've done? My goodness. Look at you,
the hero! You're a great man! You chased it down and bloody well bashed its
brains in!"
"What the hell was it?"
"I've no idea! I told you, fabric of reality unraveling."
The TV, looking decayed, began to disintegrate in the flow of the river. Even
the remote, which I'd knocked away in the tussle, and which I could see wedged
against a rock, had begun to dissolve. In moments all that remained was a
smooth glistening lump about the size of a fist.
"Pick it up, Zen, quick!"
"Why?"
"Do it, quick!"
Barehanding the lump, I examined it.
"What does it feel like?"
"Warm."
"Can you crack it open?"
I bashed the lump a couple of times against a rock. On the third try it
cracked. Pulling away the shards, I saw what looked like three black jelly
beans.
"Eat one."
"What?"
"Go ahead, do it! It's the heart of your enemy. Eat it."
"Are you sure?"
"Eat it!"
I did still kind of want to let loose with a primordial cry. I went ahead and
ate it.
"Well?"
"I don't know. Tastes a little like chicken."
I wanted for something to happen. But nothing.
"I don't notice anything."
"Give it an hour or so. I imagine the walk back to your house will do you
good. I can sing you 'Mother' along the way. 'Black velvet shadows . . . '”
POST 22
What
looked like Billy Connolly sang on his Segway as I walked the Avenue of the
Giants back home. It wasn’t really Billy though, but rather of course a mental
projection of the ancient alien, Tumik, probably holed up somewhere in a cave,
appearing to me in what was intended to be friendlier form.
Having
rescued my overalls-wearing, model trains-loving neighbor, Cooter, from his
discarded TV which came horridly to life in weird waters underground and held
the old man hostage, and having chased down the evil TV and beaten it to death
with my bare hands in the river, subsequently eating one of the black magic
jelly beans tucked away inside it, I began to experience the effect of seeing
more and more of what was always all around.
Now the
darkness was broken by the richest hues imaginable. Colors came from lichen
growing and glowing on the trees. Saucer-shaped fungi, ordinarily clammy and
white, afforded strange illumination. Delicate moss, lacey and coral-like,
pulsed warm turquoise light. I could still hear the crickets chirp, but now
their song, sounding slowed down, took on the tones of an enormous choir.
Extradimensional figures, shadowy and membranous, not expecting to be seen,
moved about unconcerned. On the far side of the river, semi trucks shifted
gears.
Tumik
didn’t look like Billy Connolly anymore. I saw him as he truly was, and just as
I did, he faded away, Segway included, having never really been there at all.
Now
more than ever I couldn’t wait to turn people on to the positive vibe necessary
to keep the fabric of reality from unraveling. Even more than that, I couldn’t
wait to see Rora.
It was
morning now, purple and crimson swaths of light blazing from the east over the
ragged black tree line pressed against the sky. I couldn’t wait to tell her
what I had experienced. To see the wider world was natural. Kind of like the
moon always being black, and actually not ever silver at all. That’s only an
illusion, in keeping with so much in life.
I told
Rora so when I sat by her side.
“What’s
going on?” she murmured, soft and warm, still half-asleep. I told her about the
black magic jelly bean I had ingested at the alien’s behest after killing the
TV in the river.
“See?”
I said, producing the others.
“So you
found a couple of old jelly beans?” she said, sounding awake now. “Who cares?”
I could
feel the fabric of reality starting to really unravel.
“You
are so selfish,” she said, getting worked up, looking at me like I’d just
thrown away her birthday cake.
“What
do you mean? I saw a television running around. It had claws. What, am I gonna
not tell you about that?”
“Everything
with you has to be so dramatic.”
“What?”
“Do you
really think you’re saving the world?”
“Actually
it’s all existence.”
“Because
I can tell you, you’re not saving anything.”
“But
everything I told you is true. Ask Bud about the Depp-Gonzo. Cooter will tell
you all about the TV. Go ahead, call them right now.”
“It’s
early! I’m not going to bother anybody! I don’t give a damn what your buddies
say!”
“Well
there’s no reason to yell.”
“I’ll
yell if I want!”
“Look,
I mean come on, we live in an area with a giant mechanical Bigfoot. What’s so
hard to accept about anything I said?”
“You
want to accept something? You want to
accept something? Go to hell! Accept that!”
She had
been sitting up in bed, leaning away from me as though I were a leper. With
loose bits falling. I had my magic beans in my hand, and for a moment I
couldn’t help but look at them in dumb amazement that she wasn’t hearing the
truth of my incredible adventures.
“So you
don’t even believe I met Werner Herzog?”
She
slapped the beans out of my hand and repeated, “Go to hell!”
“Hey!
Those things are special!”
Rora
started gathering up her stuff while I tried to find what Tumik had called the
heart of my enemy. Three little black beans for a heart. One I found among the
dust bunnies under some shelving. Brushing it off and putting it in a bowl with
keys and change I said, “What’s the matter with you?”
“You’re
what’s the matter,” she said, and walked right out the door.
“Now
who’s being dramatic?” I said, while I watched her drive away.
POST 23
(VIDEO TRANSCRIBED)
“Well,
here I am out in the woods, pickin’ up sticks. Probably pickin’ up ticks, too. In
this country it’s not like the people with the money want to stand in the way
of the people with the best ideas. It doesn’t matter who you are. If you work
hard and show strong leadership skills, you could be President. Then when
you’re President, you can be the one who makes the decisions. And if the
decisions you decide maybe don’t go so great for the people with the money,
they’ll understand. Win some, lose some. The main thing is that everyone wants
the intrinsic fairness of our democratic system to remain intact. Just like
always.
“I
wonder if the moon or something isn’t in retrograde. Can’t say I’ve eaten right
in a long time. Bills, bills. Money money coin chase. And why? I am an entity
entering the universe in this vibration and never once ever gave the go-ahead
for any of this slavery. If intelligence and caloric expenditure translated
into money, I would be a great slave.
“The
energy companies control the media. Which being corporate and right-wing, hide
and divide. I know lots of liberals and none run TV stations. The national news
doesn’t report what happens. It shapes what happens. We don’t live in a
democracy, we’re in a plutocracy, and this government of the lying rich
pollutes our land with corporate waste in the air and in the water. In the
toxic Frankenstein food made in hi-tech labs for some hidden rich few to own
and poison people.
“Hey
look, another stick. I have a college degree.
“To the
good, there isn’t a single part of the county that won’t get you off. Lick a
rock, that’ll get you where you’re going. Break off part of a tree, any tree,
that’ll do the trick. Fern’s even better than bananas. And if you see a dead
homeless person, by all means, chow down. Around here, dead homeless people are
chalk full of good stuff.
“Gosh,
I’m poor. I sure hate money. There used to be a time when growing pot was
wrong. So hard to imagine that now. If only I could pick up enough sticks, and
cut them faster, and sell them faster, more, more, then maybe, just maybe, plus
with a giant helping hand coming down from the clouds, maybe then I could
finally afford beginning to be able to think about even considering the dream
of initial cash outlay. But no! Of course that’ll never happen. That’s just
silly-talkin’. In reality, chem-trails. A martial law world, plentiful with
chips, drones and GMOs. Why are the awful things reality? Because, reality’s
unraveling. Why can’t I stop that? Because, gotta pick up sticks.
“Hello,
stick. Did I just take you from your girlfriend? The stick of your dreams?
Good! Why should anybody else have love? Oh hell, I can’t take this one now.
Why, sticks, why did she leave me? Why?
“Not
that she was really so amazing. But the pickings sure are slim.”
POST 24
All
right, that’s it. I’m going back down to the caves, I’m bringing back the
Tripper Room, and I’m gonna win this damn race and in the process save, not
only the world, not merely the universe, but the entire multiverse, and that’s
never been done.
Because
check this:
Subsequent
to a small amount of lamenting, a small amount of picking up sticks and
snapping, why, right as rain I headed over to my friendly neighborhood market
with purposes of perusing the cheap beer section, when lo, who should come into
the store but mine sworn enemy, the very symbol of the loss of everything decent
people ever held dear, Team Patriotic? Right away they started lying to the
girl behind the counter, lying that they would be the ones winning the coveted
Local Motion Days race fast approaching.
“How
dare you treat this princess of the redwoods in so shabby a manner?” I
declared, placing two 32-ounce bottles of heaven on the counter. “The lies you
tell fill these well-stocked walls with excrement. Don’t you sully them Cheez
Stix, boy.”
The
satin-jacketed fools. They stood there looking like department store choirboys
kicked off of “Hee-Haw.” Goober chic posers. Not all authentic like me.
“Says
here declined.”
“What?”
I
swiped my card again.
Team
Patriotic started recovering.
“Go
ahead and swipe your card one more time.”
One of
them did say, “Instant card-ma!”
“Says
declined.”
I
looked at my card.
“Instant card-ma!”
Later,
sitting out on a stump, staring at shadowy extradimensionals creeping around, I
visualized the various additions required to install on the Tripper Room in
order to sufficiently demolish the competition. Additions which I shall not
here discuss because, on leaving the market, I happened to notice that Team
Patriotic had their hallucimotion tied down on a trailer behind their shiny
white rig, all ready to test run in the river, apparently. And looking very
much like guess what?
The
Tripper Room.
Unspeakable
scum that they were, they’d been reading my blog!
POST 25
Sunlight
dancing down the branches of the tall trees shimmered on the Avenue like the
ripples in the shallows of the river snaking below the road, distant groans of
downshifting trucks hidden behind a green Cyclopean wall. Back and forth across
the river, flanked by a towering canyon of trees, and throughout the forest
rang the shrill pipings and trills of the birds. Fallen giants angled out of
the river. Dry snarls of grass dangling in ragged clots from the bushes on the
banks marked the high water, and waved like witch hair gently in the breeze.
“Tumik,”
I said, standing at river’s edge. “Don’t leave me alone with the extra-dimensionals.
Come on, send me a message, I’ve got my dead cell phone in hand. Take me to the
Tripper Room, Tumik. It is time.”
Then
Tumik’s voice appeared in my mind, and I knew to go to the side of the hill
close by. There was a bunch of tick brush and poison oak. I could feel Tumik
there on the other side of the rock. Kind of like Grady, the caretaker, talking
with Jack Torrance.
“Are
you prepared to keep reality from unraveling, Zen?” came the voice.
“I
assure you, Mr. Tumik, nothing would give me greater pleasure.”
“Do you
know that even now the members of Team Patriotic are being provided additional
funding by certain parties destroying the world for their own private gain?”
“Doesn’t
surprise me in the slightest. Doesn’t matter, either. Because I’m Team Hippie,
and I’m gonna win. Gonna win one for the people, and make those fascist tools
cry. In a plan so crazy it’s bound to work, everything will ride on this one
race. Rest assured, I’m gonna smear ‘em. And my smearing the fascists will win
the Hippie cause the needed converts, because everybody loves a winner. After
that, everything’s bound to fall into place. I’m certain of it.”
Then
did the very mountain crack open, and down inside the cave I strode, deep into
the vastness of the underworld again, bulbous white head of the almond-eyed
alien tremulously a-bob while leading the way…
POST 26
(ZEN’S
JOURNAL)
Dear
Tripper Room, you are now The Humbaba Cycle…on account you’re on wheels!
I
baptize thee.
And
thou art powered with black magic jelly bean, leaving me with one to go, seeing
how I found it on top of a book on my book shelf when I got back with you thanks
to Bud’s pickup and a chain to drag you out of the chasm. Then with no less
than the power of ancient alien technology on our side and the unremitting
goodness of having ingested the first black magic jelly bean myself, I got a
super groovy wheel system set up around you, my wondrous craft, for the road
portion of the rapidly approaching contest, easily detaching for submersion
during the final stretch down Mist River.
Standing
here inside I’ll see the waterline lap, lap against the window. I’ll see the
murky river bed lit below with fiber optics. I’ll see the rocky river bank rise
into the trees high overhead outside. Opening the ceiling hatch I’ll climb on
top and see the Local Motion Days crowds watch the race from the Avenue above.
And because I know that the fate of existence itself is at stake, I will paddle
away with such va-voom…
(LATER)
Outside
on my lawn now.
It’s
true, you know. Thoughts affect the universe. The one-time visitor, Tumik,
ancient alien whose call I follow, has long become a part of the land, and the
call that Tumik sent to me was a key in a lock beyond my knowledge.
Hold
on. Somebody’s walking up the road.
POST 27
“Whoa.”
“Yo.”
At
first I couldn’t tell whether or not this was actually Sylvester Stallone
standing in my front yard checking out The Humbaba Cycle. When he suggested
that I wear my last magic bean as the stone in a magic mood ring, I realized I
was looking at an extra-dimensional being with power to yet assume the disguise
of its choice.
“Loog,
Zen, if you wanna be the gradest Hippie in the world, if you wanna be the best,
then you just gotta tell me one thing, you wanna learn to fly, or what? ‘Cause
I’m ready to teach you how right now.”
“Seriously?
You’d teach me how to fly?”
“Absoloodly.”
I went
back in the house and found an old ring my mother never even wore anyway. After
carefully removing the purple stone, I set the last magic bean inside and bent
the metal that held the stone back up into place.
Then I went outside again,
ring slipped on index finger, and said, “Yo.”
“Loogs
like you got yourself one helluva magic mood ring, Zen. How you doon?”
“Oh,
pretty good, I guess.”
“You
feel like flying?”
“Definitely.”
“You
gotta feel the mood.”
“I feel
the mood.”
“You
wanna fly now?”
“Yeah,
totally.”
“I
don’t believe you.”
“Why?”
“The
color on the ring hasn’t changed.”
I
looked at the ring. “You know, one thing I don’t understand, why am I so
important to the preservation of reality? What kind of a burden is that to put
upon a person? Why aren’t you the one?”
“Hey,
loog Zen, I’m eggsdra-dimensional. You want me to admit it? All right, I’m a
freak. There now, you happy? Make you feel like a big man? Now come on, you
already went through this with your little pal.”
I knew
he meant Tumik.
“All
right then, there’s something else I want to know: Why don’t we just start
heaving TVs down that hole and work ourselves up a nice fat supply of TV Men
for farming? Whatever these things are”—the black oval on my outstretched index
finger faintly glimmered—“we’d be smart to start storin’ ‘em up.”
Suddenly
clarity intensified further. Bing, just like that. I had to steady myself with
my arms, that’s how good the clarity.
“Yo,
Sly,” I said, “my magic mood ring—it was black, now it’s black and orange.”
“It’s
black and orange?”
“Absolutely.”
“Yo,
you should try now.”
“How?
You mean flap my arms?”
“I’m
not sure. I never used no magic ring, Zen. But one thing I know, you gotta want
it!”
“I
wanna fly! Now! Come on, Adrian! Yo, yo!”
“You
gotta want it!”
“Yo,
Adrian!”
“I
can’t hear you!”
“Yo
Adrian! YO ADRIAN!”
“Go on,
fly away! Get outta here!”
“YOADRIAN!
AAHHHRRRGGH! YOAADDRRIAANNN!”
It was
working. I could feel myself rising from the rocky ground. Sure enough, I found
that by flapping my arms, I did indeed gain upward momentum.
I
looked down.
I was
six feet over the ground!
I
arose, extra-dimensional beings flitting out from the forest, spurious shadows
following unconcerned with communication, curious to see me seem
extra-dimensional, too. Cool air rippled my shirt. Amazingly enough, I didn’t
feel sick to my stomach at all. The
green zig-zagging river carelessly wound about, about a hundred or two feet
below. On the east side of the river, running fairly parallel, the Avenue of
the Giants. On the other side, Highway 111.
A few
miles south, Madrani. I could see the football field in the distance. Behind
me—I swiveled mid-air with ease—Darrow’s Bend sprawled around the giant
mechanical Bigfoot. Spying a sketchy crowd lazing about the town, I descended
unto the rabble and bade them behold the miracle of my aerial demonstration.
Incredibly enough, no one seemed to take much notice.
A
collection of street people had stretched out on the sidewalk. One guy,
exceedingly ripe, had a cardboard sign with a crudely drawn upward-pointing
digit with a little memo saying to like him on Facebook.
Fabric
of reality unraveling, I reminded myself, fabric of reality unraveling…
POST 28
In
preparation for race tomorrow spent entire day reading Finnegan’s Wake.
Love
it! Makes perfect sense, now.
In
fact, I love Finnegan’s Wake so much,
I went ahead and inscribed a quote from it, directly onto the exterior of the
large rectangular vessel which I shall captain to victory:
Lukkedoerendunandurraskewdylooshoofermoyportertoo-
ryzooysphalnabortansporthaokansakroidverjkapakkapuk.
The
quote starts on the front of the Tripper Room at the top edge, right in the
middle, and runs rune-like around wrapping back to the front, so the “puk”
meets the “Luk” like the knobs of a torc. With me inside the submerged Room,
the word should rest just above the water, mostly.
The
river is low. Someone from Local Motion Days left a message on my machine
saying the race will go ahead anyway. All I have to do is take my carnivalesque
non-motorized vehicle over to Werman to officially enter the competition
sometime tonight.
(LATER)
Team
Hippie—that’s me—has now officially entered The Humbaba Cycle in the race for
Local Motion Days undisputed world championship. Chalk it up to the problem at
hand that hardly anyone was even there. Normally you’d see tons of folks in
embarrassing outfits with colorful banners and everything. Incredibly enough,
neither of the TV stations up in Egeria are even going to cover the race at
all. Weirder still, it looks like there will be only six entries this year. I
don’t think that’s going to hurt my chances of winning. I already feel real
good about that. But usually they get at least thirty or forty entries,
sometimes over fifty.
Of the
six, Team Patriotic, the National Armed Resistance to Growers, and America’s
American Americans 4 America are all owned by the same multinational
corporation. Then there’s the entry called Team Panhandler, which consists of
the guys I saw panhandling in Darrow’s Bend, and then some family, the
Burtchersons.
Bud
says the local stations will continue focusing coverage on celebrating the
rising corporate demand for mandatory Radio Frequency Identification chips
implanted inside people’s hands. They’ve got parades for that all over the
place.
The
race kicks off in the morning at ten, but I’ll get there a little after eight
to set up and make final checks. According to Bud, despite a certain degree of
apathy toward the event, a lot of people, due to reading this blog, figure I’ve
got it cinched.
I don’t
want to get into it too much, but, odd thing to have to point out, there’s
nobody else on my team. Originally Bud said he was interested in it for months before
last year’s race. For whatever reason he dropped that plan pretty much at the
last minute, so I went on anyway. The first morning is the hardest part for a
single competitor to win. For me it means pedaling The Humbaba Cycle down the
Avenue of the Giants all by my lonesome, whereas all the other entries have
four or five team members.
They
also have added weight.
We’ll
head out from below Werman and stop at Darrow’s Bend for what amounts to a
bathroom break and a chance for the leader to rest, then continue on the other
few miles into Madrani where we’ll spend the night.
POST 29
I
arrived early to find The Humbaba Cycle intact. (Initially concerned about
sabotage, I let that stress go with Tumik’s assurance he’d keep watch.)
Pedaling over to the starting line, I ignored taunts from the NARGs pertaining
to my coasters.
At the
loud crack of the starting gun the ring on my finger blazed bright blue as I
pulled away from the others with incredible speed, considering conditions. A
few people were there taking selfies. You can see in somebody’s 2-minute video
on YouTube where I go by in the background. That was a few minutes before I
lost my right rear wheel. I had taken a turn a little too wide and hit the cuts
in the road that are there to alert, and my wheel jitter-jaggered right off.
Houston, we have a problem.
About
three seconds after I thought that, I looked over and I kid you not, not only
did Whitney Houston step forth from redwood and sword fern, but Lee Horsley as
Matt Houston, as well. Together, quick as a NASCAR pit crew, the two of them
fixed my wheel right as rain and had me pedaling off in a jiff. This is
perfectly legal, by the way. All of the entries have up to three helpers that
can follow along and help with repairs.
You can
see in the longer video on YouTube that Team Panhandler never really had a
chance. The wheels on their shopping cart weren’t working right, the surface of
the road was too bumpy, three of the guys sat watching off to the side, and the
other two argued in the cart.
The
Burtchersons left early on. I felt bad for the kid.
America’s
American Americans 4 America had about as much chance as Team Panhandler. Their
entry was a whole bunch of beer cans shaped like a big beer can. It had some
sort of framework inside, but all four guys were way overweight, and you can
see in the video they last about a mile before the whole thing falls completely
apart in the road.
Team
Patriotic and the NARGs each have five-dude teams. I barely beat them into
Darrow’s Bend, even in this higher state of my attainment. Yet, with the star
people on my side, I have at every turn prevailed.
Team
Hippie being the first to emerge up the steep hill into Madrani momentously
encompassed glory. For me, anyway, knowing what’s on the line. And oh, how the
evidence of my mission’s import abounds.
Things
have gotten so bad, manufactured rain and Frankenstein food either go unnoticed
or seem fine. It’s like Rod Taylor among the Eloi now.
Sleeping
in the Tripper Room tonight and tomorrow. Sure could go for Yvette Mimieux.
I don’t
have to wonder what flipped Rora’s lid. Her inexplicable refutation of me is
perfectly in keeping with the core issue: the multiverse is falling apart and I
can’t let that happen. No matter what, I have to hold everything together.
There’s
a hole as big as a beach ball hanging in the air behind the Post Office. Over
at the football field, the goal posts are dripping.
With
everything at stake, the prize is to survive.
POST 30
All day
long, Ben-Hur in the river. Fortunately—or perhaps by design?—my lats have
always been awesome. Not for nothing did I chuck all those bags of fertilizer
at Big Nursery, because I sure was able to lay into that oar.
I was
surprised to find a small crowd had gathered, and felt somewhat distracted by
the people lining the road down to the river, tooting kazoos. I didn’t want to
be rude but I didn’t want to take my hands off the handlebars to wave back
because I was booking as fast as I could. At one point I took the turn so wide
on the gravel road, I actually overshot it. However, I willed The Humbaba Cycle
back onto the road from literally hanging in thin air over an embankment.
About
fifty feet shy of the river I had to disengage the wheel system. It was just
too rocky, with the river so low.
Regarding
implements attained in my journey, who knows if you can overwork them, or
whether they improve in efficacy with use, or what exactly to expect? I worked
one of the nodules that I’ve been calling magic beans down to nothing rubbing
it all over the exterior of the Tripper Room. I don’t know how long the one I
ate will work on me, or if its effects will fade at all. In any case, I needed
to get the Room in the river, and I didn’t want to bash it up on the rocks any
more than necessary, knowing how it would be getting plenty enough of that
soon, so I willed myself into flight without so much as a “Yo Adrian” now,
grabbed onto the railing and slowly lifted the Room off of the river bar. You
can see me on YouTube carefully deposit the Room hanging at arm’s length in the
middle of the river, then descend from Superman-mode and get inside.
Closing
the hatch, I steadied myself in the bobbing Room and watched the waterline
slosh and splash against the window as it spun. Glad to be out of view of the
growing crowd, for a long moment I was loathe to get back out there and start
paddling. I was sick of having to do anything and wanted to just sit.
But
this was madness. I shook my head, took a deep breath, and managed to snap out
of it.
The
problem with the Tripper Room is being totally not at all nautical. It spins
about aimlessly at best. Super hard to control, especially with me up on top.
Behind me I could see Team Patriotic kept three dudes inside and used two to
paddle. The NARGs were still stuck in the shallows with some catastrophe going
on, I couldn’t tell what from where I was. (Later on I heard they cracked their
hull.)
Then I
saw Team Patriotic starting to get too close. Chucking the paddle in the Room,
I closed the hatch, got out, and pushed from behind in Superman-mode again.
Evidently,
my miracles are beginning to get noticed.
I’ve
taken the race downriver now, having arrived just south of Darrow’s Bend at the
bend in the river where I’m spending the night in the Room one more time. It’s
dark now. I can hear some festivities coming from town.
And to
think that this used to be fun.
POST 31
(POST
BY TUMIK AS MARK TWAIN)
Puuuff.
Creeaak.
Ah put
that puff in there, and the creak as well, because they are, in
fine, most convenient affectations to signal the change in speaker for this
final post in a story as wild and wooly as the place and time that it records,
precisely the way Zen Mendosa would have wanted it.
The
next morning, Zen awoke in the Room instantly aware of his surroundings and
utterly prepared for the last stage of the race, for the final conflict,
whereupon achieving the ultimate destination downriver, there would then be
required of the victor the ceremonial wresting of the mistletoe.
Indeed,
as Zen himself so keenly perceived, at this point in the race the extraordinary
achievements he displayed had developed no small local renown. From a core
group of several who had witnessed his power of flight, the word spread online.
And as the fame of Team Hippie grew in those couple days, there was barely
enough reduction in watching tube to interrupt regular programming. This of
course was all part of the plan.
By the
time Zen rounded the final bend in Ol’ Mist, there were scads of folks dyin’ to
identify with a man who was clearly about to win big. A Hippie man, by all
accounts. A one-man team. A Lone Hippie.
The
river, you’ll recollect, having fallen to a lamentable level because of big
business causing global warming, lacked force to the current, so that Zen had
to once again employ as much miraculous power as he could muster. Regrettably,
it wasn’t much. The ring proved to be a bit of a dud. It never should have been
used as a magic mood ring in the first place. Secondly, he waited too long with
it. I’m amazed it did anything at all. Same with the other one. Probably, if
he’d eaten all three immediately, everything would’ve been fine right away, but
we didn’t have that information at the time.
Quite a
few genuine celebrities showed up, having originally perused Zen’s blog in
anger after Googling themselves. Very quickly, however, every last one realized
he was trying to help humanity, the whole schmere, and because they had all
grown to love him, they cheered with intense pizzazz as he pulled and pulled
the ponderous contraption through the shallows toward the finish line.
Sweating
and wheezing, he strained and he strained.
Johnny
Depp himself appeared, publicly reprising his role as Dr. Gonzo. He cheered Zen
on and so did Werner Herzog, standing right next to him. I have it on good
authority they dined that night. Other than Johnny’s personal security having
to escort Bud away—and it took six of them—the last bit of the race went just
dandy.
The
ceremonial mistletoe, having endured a great many years of being wrested, had
been reduced to a pretty paltry condition, and was basically a stick. Used as
Zen was to picking up sticks, this seemed fitting.
Anyway, folks cheered, and
the celebrities seemed amused.
Yes,
Zen won. And when he did, a subtle yet distinct popping sound could be heard.
This was the hole behind the Post Office way over in Madrani closing. A couple
minutes later, even the goal posts stopped dripping.
People
putting synthesized burgers to their mouths stopped, looked at the sky, and
said, “What’s with the tic-tac-toe board up there?”
Team
Patriotic was broken. Folks cheered. A sense of community grew.
Personally,
I suspected that Zen would literally become a Bigfoot, and then Rora would
marry him. I saw a whole full circle thing going on with these uncanny events,
but of course that’s not how real life works.
In
truth, when he had climbed back onto his Tripper Room, mistletoe stick in hand,
for a victory photo-op, a cloud appeared quite separate from the chem-trails, a
big dark cloud with an ill-concealed flying saucer inside. From this saucer in
the cloud a beam of light shot down, enveloping Zen in a display spectacular to
behold. And then Zen arose. He ascended right on up into that cloud—or rather
the silent saucer inside.
After
that…he was gone. They took him away.
Zen had
done so good, it was time for his intergalactic tour.
By way
of epilogue, I might add that Rora started a blog. A few of her acquaintances
pretend to like it, but it ain’t nothin’.
Bud’s
managed to improve his standard of living by selling Zen-related merchandise
and giving tours of his Tripper Room replica. I secreted the real one back down
in the caves. It waits for his return. He deserves that.
By
being the greatest Hippie ever, and inspiring others to follow his example, Zen
saved everything for everyone. Literally. True, even today, not everyone knows
about Zen around here. After what he’s done though, that’s okay. Besides, in
infinite numbers of other places, he’s positively huge.
