Alter My State, To Get To This State

Ceci n'est pas un chapeau that looks like one that belonged to my 1st ex-wife 20 (twenty? LMAO) years ago sitting on a middle school gymnasium floor where I was a night janitor. There's a sentence I wouldn't have imagined stating as objective fact and not some chimeric fiction in an unpublishable story before the start of COVID insanity. You can see the phone's shadow under the overhead fluorescents, proof of my witness. I have (had?) a photo of her wearing it somewhere, where if memory serves, she's smiling, but there's no chance I'm going looking for that.

This is four hundred feet of rhubarb and it does not give a fuck about your lower back and will continually sprout flowering bodies that the farm owner demands you to rip out as they are an energy suck to the parts of the rhubarb he does want to grow. The bushes are three feet high and six feet across. The flower stalks shoot up over the bush like some kind of xenomorphic antennae. The pruning must be done every four or five days or else the biology gets away from the farmer's ability to curtail it with his own. So, yeah, I started work as a hand seasonally at a local, mostly potato, family farm. This is also a sentence that is grand in its absurdity while simultaneously capital t "True".  It's pretty wild, the farm, and I feel like I'm in a Wes Anderson movie as I'm moving around, being transported to a field in the back of a 1970's-ish diesel fueled Isuzu, or walking behind a tractor drawn planting implement that is depositing squash starts into a plastic sheet. I know the camera crew is out there and if I try only a little I can dream up an appropriate emo soundtrack to accompany the footage. 

Here's a picture of where the squash would eventually find their summer homes. This is where we sealed the desired portion of earth with a plastic sheet. My job was to anchor the plastic and the irrigation tape as the tractor unspooled the roll down 400 feet of powdery soil. After the tractor would descend the row, another hand severed the tape and plastic and then served as anchor as the tractor returned to me. I sat, waiting, in the shade of portoshitter and watched the tractor crawl back like some kind of live action Andrew Wyeth painting. Later, I would watch a wolf spider hop about and later still a beetle would try to employ me as a rock. Later still, on some other day back at the same field, a flock of sandhill cranes flew over, croaking, about thirty feet off of the ground. I took a video and considered that I was an "intelligent" ape using a highly specialized rock to access updates from people all across the globe. Haha. Man, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. 

The River. One thing I've really grooved to, working at the farm, is how much time I spend outside, tuning into the animal nature that's carrying these dumb thoughts around. It's hot, labor intensive, and often miserable, yet at day's end when I peel off my filthy socks and clap on my flip flops and wash my face and hands and head for the bar I feel a great satisfaction with nothing, almost as if the physicality of it drains one of existential dread. Just the other day, I felt I knew a little more intimately what Cain felt when his brother's offering curried more favor with Yahweh than his own had. I'd kill a motherfucker with a rock too. Then again, wouldn't we all?

Balance, Balance, Balance

The cafe is a vast and sobering place. Lunch press is upon the baristas caroming behind the counter to espresso, pasta, soup, chatter, receipt tape, orders up, mania broadcast from every cornice. There are folks here, all white, hugging and laughing and, before I juiced into the prog jazz station recommended for me by an A.I., conversing about the economy and recovery and COVID related things. Across from me at the shared long table, is a man whose laptop declaims loudly his a: being a gun owner and b: that he is stolidly pro-Trump. The women, one of them is probably Eowyn Ivey, all wearing the uniform of the white: yoga pants/leggings, puffy Northface coats, children in tow. Earlier, in the library, there was a woman, in the uniform of the day, with four children, only one of which was school age whose youngest daughter supplicated, pulling at mom's coat pocket flap with a keening "unnhhh, unnhh" for a full three minutes before her mother dismissed her with, "One minute, honey." I was in line behind her and imagined all the implications of the scene before me, all 4 billion years of it, the absurd machinery. Who are these people? Why can't they get out of my head? Why can't I get out of my own?

Later, I went to the grocery store and spoke only in memes, aloud, to the patrons attempting to shop alongside me. I spent 80 USD to purchase items to make po'boys. I laughed in the check out line as I relayed this amount to Uly. When he didn't appreciate the hypocrisy, I enjoined him to chuckle, in the vein of Foghorn Leghorn, as "It's a joke son, you're supposed to laugh." I have the feeling that I'm going to be the old man in the home who speaks in crude and unrecognizable snippets of a lifetime of exposure to a culture that refuses right understanding and all cogent analysis. (Can you imagine explaining your daily life to an extra-terrestrial?) I imagine the long suffering CNAs doomed to cater to my needs as eye-rolling goddesses. How can one study a thing without the trappings of its infection? Maybe that's where the writing comes in, a kind of barely-maintaining-sanity-life preserver, a consciousness Mae West inflatable. Maybe the point is to become so cryptic and esoteric that one eschews ciphering, to write oneself into a nice solipsistic dreamscape from which awakening is unable and undesired? 

The older I get, the more I seemingly understand, as much as anyone understands anything, the flow of the jazz tunes that the machines suggested I hear. I've been in the nerve for a while now, long enough feel profoundly revolutionized yet not long enough to begin to question my initial assumptions, a dangerous juncture. I might say any number of asinine things at any second, outing myself as a fraud, a neophyte, an idiot. I wonder if the Trump sticker guy has these thoughts. Maybe I should ask him over a heteronormative and totally not homosex beer that I know, at least for myself, is going to happen later? We could talk shop, discuss the nation, engage my fellow patriot. The fictions we collectively suckle are delightful indeed. Wait, hold up, I just glanced over at my man's next to me (not the Trump dude) screen and found he was reading the story of Jesus's encounter with the famed (infamous?) tax collector sitting in a sycamore. I'm surrounded. I'm terrified. I'm in love. Man, is this track screaming. I need to displace, to reload.

The new pos is engaged with an enemy in the form of a white man, bearded, 30s, wearing a hoodie, who is roundly expounding about the military-industrial complex to a table of similarly raced folks, both apparent men and women. Oh, he's going hard at it, talking, talking, talking, declarative in extremis (What is it, exactly, that I think I'm fucking doing right now?). A woman at the hand-gesturing instructor stretched her back, twisting against the chair in left and right arcs and revealed she had, no doubt during the course of this very morning's shower, shaved her armpits bare. The light fixture over the table's head has one blown fluorescent bulb, the kind that, when introduced a while ago would destroy the incandescent bulb market and was seen, by some, as anathema to lighted structures. The walls of the cafe are decked in new watercolors and ink at obscene prices. I am beset by words, by lies, and the more I see them, the more I hate lies, as Captain Willard would say.

I was recently taken with the fantasy of using Uncle Joe's stimmy money to partake in a Greyhound bus tour of the Michigan wilds. Jesus Christ guys, I just took out my earbuds to go get a birch beer with ice and heard mil-ind complex guy say "For a minute there I thought you said 'game theory' and I was all 'eeeeeee' because it seems complex but it's really based on simple principles." (Legit LOLs here in the cafe as I type.) Anyway, I wanted peruse the highways, in Poe Ballantine fashion, of the upper Midwest, logging country as I understand it according to Papa Hem, and meet a kindly old man named Bert who would teach me to hunt and fish the land in a way my father never did. We would wear mackinaw coats and hunting caps with ear flaps and stroll the wood with our shotguns, looking for pheasants. Bert would be the kind of person who had never heard the construct "cancel culture". He would be solidly anti-hippie, but would, for reasons unknown to himself, take a liking to my long hair and ratty beard. He would have vague libertarian notions of national governance. Evenings, we'd sit by his cabin's glass-doored woodstove and stare into the fire without words, sharing warm whiskies, before a shuffle off to sleep. A completely absurd scene, surreal really, one that lives in my mind, like this cafe, like the baristas, like the Trump guy, like Zaccheus, like the military industrial complex, like this music, like everything else.

Jesus, these are words.