Garden Variety

He sat in front of a computer, having painted the staircase walls and ceiling and resting now that he had made a contribution to the house. Looking out the window to the east, he saw flowers, small red flowers in lines where the cauliflower or corn had grown and been harvested. The small red flowers reminded him of the Wizard of Oz poppies. He looked them up on the computer in front of him, and discovered them to be corn poppies. The sky was a heavy and grey one, an English sky weighing down on the fields and the horizon.

He went out and had a closer look at the flowers. Vladimir stood above them and tried to eat them, to see what they tasted like. They were caustic, bitter, and sour. Continuing on a walk, a longer walk through the quiet and ethereal country side, he passed tall purple flowers and their large globes of seeds, each one some magical wand of sleepy witchery, a cold and white green. They caught his eye. They were tall and beautiful. He felt, as usual, that he was somehow dead, wandering the earth as some ghost in search of rest. Peace only came in transient and fleeting nods.

Something told him to pick the tall witchwand flower stalks. They bled from the places where he broke them off. The long fibers oozed a sticky red blood, like they had human souls or they bled in sacrifice or lament of sadness itself. He chewed the woody fibers, and salivated the bloody pulp until he could swallow it. Vladimir felt like he was invested in some witchly ritual for peach. A spherical ritual of a three dimensional pentragram, and with each ancient mastication, some peace crept into his heart. The stark sky seemed to begin to let the sun through.

When he got back to the house, Vladimir broke the fibrous globes into smaller bits with a scissors and poured hot water over them like the oldest cup of tea. They bled the water red and brown, like the rusty sanguine peace the water now held. He let it steep until it was cold, then drank it with a cigarette that he rolled. In front of the computer named "trimagestus", the peace from his caduceus tea crept in to his heart. The documents he read on trimagestus showed the purple and white flowers to be setigerums. He was amazed, so he lit another cigarette.

A year later, he was smoking a cigarette talking to Paul. Paul spoke about a book that indicated that the flowers Vladimir was finding along the banks of the dikes were of ancestry from flower growing competitions of 100 years before. The book was about opium and the masses. Vladimir was mystified and amazed. He lit another cigarette. The smoke coiled up to the hermetic sky. He thanked the ancestors for their honesty.

Suspicious

He laid down under the tower, and stared up at the dark blue, early light sky through its iron. This was as personal as he needed to get with the tower, under its arc, near its foot. It looked suspiciously sturdy. It was cold, but he was drunk and still had a liter of wine. His lips and teeth were the same red of a bulls mouth in tauromachy. He drank the wine like it was blood for him, like he was losing it through holes in his skin, like he needed it to stay alive. His own tongue felt like it should hang out of a mouth like a bull's that is being killed. The sun would be out soon with the Parisians. He was not good at dying.

He let the earth spin him into the sun, under this tower, this defiance, like he was hiding comfortably under it. Still on his back, he let the morning street cleaners come into earshot and then couldn't bear it. He had no idea what day of the week it was. It didn't matter anyway. He piled his skeleton up and walked. Marcel was sure he was already dead, that he was cast into a purgatory, heaven or hell that looked and behaved like the world he knew around him. The woman who squatted over a stream of urine that ran down the slope of the street he lived off of was a sentinel, a psychopomp. With her dirty and dried skin draped naked with a veil of a white dress and her endless stream of urine, she kept a sinister and quiet guard that he didn't challenge. She didn't seem to acknowledge him when he passed anyway.

It was endless, and timeless. When he went to the ATM, it gave him money. When he took money to Chateau Rouge, they would give him Skenan. When he woke up, he was usually in his or a familiar bed, though sometimes he would see a ceiling and have no idea where he was. He liked the idea that a Lama once said that the experience of not knowing where you are or even what you are when you are first waking was the closest that most men would ever come to achieving enlightenment. The nebula that were his eyes, the smoke and mirrors that made this funhouse so surreal became comfortable. Sometimes he woke up alone in the dark coiled up in the bathtub, the water a cold serpent wrapped around him.

Marcel's heart beat at night, over the radio, over the traffic on the street outside his slatted window covers. The acrid exhaust sometimes crept in. He cast it back out by lighting a Lucky Strike. He would lie awake, sometimes just waking at night and collect his escaping nimbose afterlife with whatever was between his small fridge and his small table.

He seamed his way through Paris streets, not knowing where he was, and impossibly lost because he was in a perpetual state of Jamais Vu. He knew how to go by Metro, but walking a cardinal direction was never easy. He stopped to get a strong short coffee for a euro. It went down smoky and hot, and burned. The day was starting and he needed to get out of its way. The keepers of this hell were not sympathetic. The streets filled with persons hurrying along with breads and papers and bags. There was a quiet hum, that roared loud in ears that had fallen in love with the quiet birds just before they start at dawn. He drank a stomachfull of wine. Then he woke up in his bed, with swollen lips and a dry tongue.

небесное пространствоиздат

"You get the same thing everyone gets: A life to live." - B. John
"And no one gets out alive." - A. E.

I love this

Lune

There he sat on a low ledge to a large window. He was an alien. Maybe he always was or always would be, but at that moment he certainly was. What the hell were these kids doing, eating lunch and engaged in some young people game he didn't know the rules for? So he stared at nothing or he read nothing or he became nothing. For several days this was so, and every day at lunchtime he tried to hide from observation by climbing into a window. The struthious and painful. There was no stoicism, but numbness. Hermes was not happy. He had capitulated his noble savage campaign, and was being socialized with the leaders' children, except it didn't work. He was living in a suburban satellite city, but it may as well have been the moon. In fact, he'd surely prefer the moon. The skateboarding kept him anchored in some sense of self, some sense he would not relinquish. Strangely, he did not identify with music. He didn't like lyrics and he only listened to a few things for comic value that quickly dissipated. He smoked cigarettes when he wasn't allowed, he smoked ganja when he could, and he could often. He tried to die alive in suburbia, except his heart would not give.

A young woman came up to the window ledge and sat down. She asked him some questions he couldn't remember, and extended some warmth or indication of the amicable. She was quiet like the ghost he was trying to become, but more comfortable and translucent. Then they knew each other. He would stop going to school again, but for the time she was a muse. Someone once said that Hermes had done a lot of things but not truly lived very much. This was maybe true even then. When he saw skateboarders he felt like he was still part of some tribe, but the wild antics of his heart were caged here. Social laws were well established. He was a visigoth, a savage, a magician. There was no place for him here, where the temples were chain restaurants and the odysseys were to Disneyworld. He was bestowed with an anachronistic heart. The muse's name was Estelle.

Estelle made a challenging invitation to visit her at the beach while she was there with her family. Hermes already knew the secret that to live as a man, one needs only clean socks, underwear, water, and occasional food. An angel of prophecy gave him a gift of coins, to follow his heart. So he embarked on a journey to the sea, with nothing more than he could easily carry on his shoulder. In making space, he cast off the world that typically rest upon that shoulder. If the world fit into a backpack, he had no qualms to bear the weight of it. He made the journey with two college girls who overestimated his age when they picked him up on the side of the road. They were drinking wine coolers, and they were laughing more than any situation he could understand warranted. He was glad to get out of the car.

It was early evening and he hadn't found anywhere to rest. A friend should have been around, and probably was, but this was before telepathy & cell phones. He and Estelle sat on a bench in a park late into the night. They talked and smiled and he exhibited every nervous antic in the spectrum of the young man lacking confidence. Somehow it was warm and magical, even if it was uncomfortable. Lucioles, lightning bugs were his mates and he was home wherever they were.

The First Panel of the Garden of Earthly Delights

Hermes adjusted to a young nomadic life where he only possessed what he carried in his bag. He smoked what cigarettes he was given, and he was loved by those who were amused by his peculiarities. Much of the time, he slept on one of a few sofas in apartments rented by college students. The adolescent tides of sexual appetite were a plague. Skateboarding of course alleviated some of that energy, but it was still there, still persistent and at times nearly consuming. One morning he woke up on the sofa of 4 college girls' living room with Ted staring down at him. Ted asked, "Did you hear? We're going to Louisiana?" "What? What the hell are you talking about?" "It's in the papers and all. Get your stuff together. Oh, that's right, you don't have any stuff to get together. Jason will be here in 15 minutes."

So Hermes took Ted's word for it and woke up enough to get his bag back together and smoke cigarette ends in the ashtray. It was about as strange a way to wake up as he had known. Soon enough, Jason came in the door to the apartment and waved a hand that said, "saddle up, boys, we're hitting the trail" and we followed him out to the Isuzu Rodeo that a significant injury had won him. I'm sure he'd prefer to have his original health, but today he was making use of the car

"Where are we going?" Hermes demanded. "Do you really care, man?" Jason responded. And in that question lay his answer. Hermes knew a girl, a very beautiful and young girl he had met at some religious camp a couple of years back and had kept in correspondence with. Ted's dad lived in the mountains in Tennessee. There was the itinerary.

Along the way, they passed through Gatlinburg, home of Dollywood. They didn't stop. Late in the evening, at dusk they must have arrived at Ted's dad's little house on the mountainside. Hermes had been asleep and no one woke him up until they were going to eat. Then they came and got him out of the car and for the second time in one day he woke to a world of absurdity.

Across the gravel, just inside the door were the washing machine and dryer, upon which a shotgun lay. There was a chain around the handle of the refrigerator, with a lock that wasn't fastened. Ted introduced Hermes. "What is he, some kind of Indian?" asked Ted's dad. Ted smiled his mischievous smirk and said, "yeah, he's Cherokee I believe." "Well he better not steal nothing."

Ted's dad's friends were sitting around a small table playing cards. He relayed the introduction, "This is my injun' friend, 'Hermes'. Say 'How', Hermes." "Uhm, Hello."

It became Hermes' task to open the cans of Chili for dinner and heat them up on the vintage stove. This bound him to the same kitchen as the country gentlemen playing cards around the table, with their witty comments and banter and asides. "Don't burn the chili!" they admonished him.

They ate the damned chili from a can. Since Hermes was lowest on the Totem, so to speak, and last one in the house, he was given a reclining chair to sleep in. The only channel that Ted's dad watched was the Country Music Channel, and he left it on 24 hours a day in case he might miss something. So Hermes let his exhausted soul sink into that dusty reclining chair to the Achy Breaky Heart that was this world.

In the morning, Ted briefed Hermes and Jason on the mission they had to get to the country store and get supplies for his father. It was assumed that because Ted was from Back East he had money and the inclination to look after his kin. So Ted pretended that he did.

At the store they had plenty of cans of chili, corned beef hash, boxes of gelatin, bread and butter pickles, white bread, and various canned vegetables. They also had whiskey. Ted bought some of each. None of us had any money. It was insane.

When we got back and Ted presented his gratitude for the hospitality, Ted's dad asked if we'd ever had moonshine. It was like 9 in the morning. He produced a canning jar from under the sink with an apple floating in it. Then he unscrewed the lid, handed it to me and said, "be careful, you're an injun'." And so I was.

We let it be known that we were going on our way, that we were very grateful, and that we'd stop by on the way back if means allowed. Then we saddled up, walked past the laundry with the shotgun on top of it, and into the auto. Back on the interstate, we headed south. The new mission was the utopia of New Orleans, a magical city of costumes and nudity, like some sort of occult ball.

Along the way, I disclosed that I knew a beautiful girl whom I had kissed at camp some time back who lived in Louisiana. She lived in Natchitoches. That was where we should be heading. She was hot, and sweet, and southern. So Natchitoches replaced New Orleans for me, and when we got there I knew in my heart I wouldn't be leaving.

When we found the town, we looked for a phone booth. Back in those days some phone booths had phone books chained to them. I looked up "Iskenderian" and found an address that matched the one I recalled from our correspondence. I phoned the number and she was jumping on the phone with excitement. Why she'd be so excited to hear from me was unknown, but it was a good omen.

We pulled into the gravel driveway some minutes later, passing along the Red River and its french iron wrought benches. Everything was glowing with warm and wet sun. Spanish moss draped the trees and I knew I was in a magical land, somewhere else. Her family, her mother was somewhat cautious by us three boys, but because of my very factual and sincere presentation of my homeless predicament, she insisted that I stay with her. The other two had other plans. Ted and Jason were still New Orleans bound.

Jason didn't believe I was staying. But I was. I wanted a new life, and this was far enough away from anything I knew that I could start living here. Really start living. The aether was thin and I could breathe. Each lungful of wet air gave me a hunger for the potential. I was staying.

Thank You Bright Eyes

Big Bertha =or= Yes, I am a rocket scientist

The neighborhood was built on some rotting dinosaurs, and it smelled that way. The machines, the big yellow machines they used to unearth the earth, strip the trees and unleash the gases of million year old putrefying dinosaur made the suburban outpost hum. There were empty fields, evocative of a desert. It was the northeast. The houses were one story, like the same desert, sometimes called "ranch houses" by whomever would try to sell them or sell them to themselves. The water company was artesia. All imagination, all indicators were that this was a little desert enclave in the swampy forested midatlantic. It was literally a cultural desert.

Mose and Otard were friends. Old friends. They lived in houses on opposite ends of an expansive empty and dry field which had given up the ghosts of those dead dinosaurs so long ago. In the afternoons the would get up to whatever skateboarding, soccer, or prank that was inspired that day. Somehow Otard had a whole cache of Estes brand model rocket engines, which he had previously overlooked as interesting. In the backyard there was a shed and a bicycle sally port that had a metal roof. Using magnesium fuse that had been acquired through Mose and his connections, Otard would light the small engines propped up on a rock or whatever and watch them careen off in to the hilly field, wildly changing course and propelling through the air like some kind of scrivened cursive. Man, he loved that.

There were also rockets. There were smaller rockets with model numbers that he had put together from kits, with fins to guide the projectile on a course set by a long steel rod and a loop on the side of the rocket which gave the projectile a good start. They went up, sometimes to the point where they could barely be made out with his eyesight, and then were supposed to discharge the cone with a small final expulsion. There were rumors that they had cameras that one could also set up to be fired with the parachute that was the payload in the cone of these rockets, taking a single photo from the peak of the trajectory. He did not have one of these cameras. Later he thought to fly a kite or a helium balloon made of mylar or something strong above his Harlem 6th floor apartment, with a wireless camera perpetually casting its view down to a receiver and potentially fed through a web page, but the romance of a view looking down from the sky had not struck him yet.

So the rockets went up and they came down, and then engines when fired alone would spell out some mystical divine message above the dry and very flammable tall grass. The fear that the rocket would settle on the ground with fuel enough to set the grasses alight made the excitement all the more profound. There were considerations to take the fuel out of the engines and somehow concatenate them into a larger engine, but the fuel was solid and they were aware that this project probably held unanticipated features that they did not have the resources to address. The bastards were fast though. Probably at least 100 miles per hour on a small rocket.

Big Bertha was a large pink rocket that sat in the corner of Otard's bedroom, a monument to the future. She stood 3' tall and pink, and had the diameter of a can of soda. Her guiding fins were thicker and stronger than the smaller rockets, and she had not the fitting for the Estes size engines. She was the future of rocketry. She was pink and unafraid. Her statuesque defiance of levity was an affectionate challenge. She had no parachute. She was a one-way rocket, and the only launch she deserved was the good one.

Mose had an uncle that worked for a company called Rocket Research. They probably made weather rockets or something, and in retrospect, this was probably the source of the magnesium fuse that burns so beautifully under water. This was tested in the blue plastic backyard kiddie pool. Fire under water was a James Bond scuba welding affair. Some serious business. Then it became a tool. Those electric ignitions with the equivolent of a match head on a thin wire were flaky, and one of the things that unnerves a rocket scientist is a flaky ignition system. The magnesium fuse, which burned evenly and very very very hot, was a sure-fire thing so long as the engine and the fuse were in reliably solid contact. They were also outside of the established Estes safe ignition protocol, and inherently advanced in that they were not accepted by the establishment.

One afternoon, Mose said that he had an engine for Bertha. For whatever reason, Otard dismissed this as bullshit, since there were no known retail engines and he did not have faith that Mose had stayed up all night working on a prototype engine of Bertha's caliber. The excitement that Mose probably expected, and did not receive, killed his own excitement. The engine did exist, but was ignored because of Otard's very unscientific presumptions.

Rocketry was put aside, since the small engines were expensive and neither of them had any regular source of income. Still, Big Bertha stood in the corner. She had black & white checkered collar below the nose cone, and the lovely washed out desert pink. Big Bertha was a one-way rocket.

The seasons changed and it was winter. Winter inhibited rocketry, as recovery was impeded by wet and cold. Foliage was thinner, and it should have been taken advantage of, but neither of the young rocketeers were into the idea. It was a video game season. Sure, snow was fun, but for the most part it was not a time for adventuring into the fields in search of a 1-2' long tube of cardboard.

Finally the early spring came, with all of its impish opportunity and Mose came over to Otard's house with the fabled Rocket Research engine. Otard was amazed. It was made of some sort of plastic, maybe pvc, and as big as he imagined a stick of dynamite to be. It had a different material for a nozzle, or the nozzle was fitted with a second, harder nozzle. It had model numbers that did not fit the Estes schema, and it was heavy. She didn't even fit into Bertha's motor mount. They had to devise a way to mount this engine, and it would require fitting a collar into the existing motor mount and adding the length of the engine to the base of the rocket. They looked at anything that was cylindrical and made of a material they could work with. Wrapping paper tubes (too small), PVC pipes (too difficult), tall beer cans (too messy, not strong enough), etc. Finally they found a poster tube that fit nearly perfectly, and with some taped wedging, the engine fit snugly into it and the fit they made by screwing the existing motor mount crossways suspended into the new engine mount kept the engine enough near to center. They worked on modeling this mount for the better part of a week.

Finally they were satisfied, or disenchanted with working on this part of the project and wanted to get to the launch. They considered that they better give this particular launch a wider berth. A Big Berth. They used a 4' length of magnesium fuse, improvised a launch rod with some dowling rod and she stood so beautifully on her launch that they took their time, savoring the potential and contending with the fear that this power may be more than they were equipped to handle. There was fear.

At 16:06:08 they lit the end of the fuse with a butane torch lighter, having established that it takes about 28secs per foot for the fuse to burn. The rocket began to ignite at 8 minutes after and took off with a roar they had not heard before. It made them cover their ears and the neighborhood echoed the blast. Clumps of dirt flew up and out to 7 or 8 feet and there was a great trail of acrid smoke. They watched for several seconds the rocket ascend, then turn slightly south and carry with the same velocity and exhaust that it had left the launch. Soon the rocket appeared to get so small, to become such a speck so far away that they wondered if it began its descent. The backdrop in the sky was a white and fluffy cumulus cloud and they could not see any indication that it had pierced this cloud, or any indication that it hadn't.

They never saw that rocket again. Suddenly, the attention from the neighbors, now curious what that blast was about made them overly aware of the significance this launch could have. They ran up to the launch spot, saw that there was a 2.5' wide crater 1.5' deep and tried to kick the missing dirt back into it. They knocked over the wooden rod, and then walked quickly back to Otard's house. Did that rocket just go into orbit? They would never know, but probably. Would the g-men come knocking? Maybe. The rocket days were over. They had no more engines, and Big Bertha was sent home.

Cartwheels and Unappetizing Meals

The young American thirst washes the stomach of the congregation of vapors, the dilution of enzymes and acids and anything brushing the mucous of the stomach. Ice in the drinks, all the way up, it helps fight the sweetness. The changing of hands between cuts of the meat, a bizarre and obsolete practice, a throwback to pre-plumbing maybe. A royal defiance no American cares about, they just do it. Use your dominant hand for the cutting, the subserviant hand for the eating.

It is a beautiful thing to see people saying grace over a restaurant meal. How beautiful! Not that it should matter, that their beliefs should be adopted, but love that they are so invested.