L’APPEL DU VIDE
("Director's Cut." This version is for the internet. It has photos & YouTube songs. Email me for a shorter, words-only version if you prefer uninterrupted blocks of text)
“Someday I’m gonna marry that girl…”
- Utah to Arizona
I Heaven & Hell
If there is a place
haunted with glee
& freighted with grace
& waiting for me
to throw the ball right
a long spiral in flight
weight moving through space
for each winner a place
“Wait a sec, Father. If there’s football in heaven, how is that even possible?”
“What do you mean?”
“How is that heaven for the losing team? To lose a football game every night for eternity? And even the winning team? Wouldn’t they get sick of it? And how old are the football players? The age they were when they died? Or the age they were in their football prime?”
“…”
“Are you going to answer me, or is this one of those you can’t ask that question because it contradicts the word of Christ?”
“Well, I’ll give it a shot. Maybe, hell exists inside heaven. And the losing team is experiencing hell, while the winners experience heaven.”
“So heaven and hell share the same geographical space?”
“…”
“Heaven and hell share the same geographical space?”
“…”
“You’re a priest and you don’t know the answer?”
“…”
“Father Oliveri! Do heaven and hell share the same geographical space?”
“Yes! Yes! They do!
“So heaven and hell and the world are identical. There’s no fucking difference!”
“Watch your language, mister.”
“This world is full of assholes and nice people.”
“I said watch your language!”
“Angels and demons, then. This is your justification for why I can’t drink coffee because I’m fourteen?”
“I have many justifications for why you can’t do certain things.”
“And I have a growing list I keep in a journal of all the bullshit things you say. It’s over 400 pages now. You wanna see it?”
Father Oliveri slammed on the brakes of his Ford Tempo and slapped his foster son in the face.
II Middle Ages & Minimum Wages
it’s always one big toss-up as to who’s got the gossip
is it maidens who make it in true blue sewing circles
or knights who say they’ve seen it in long valleys full of secrets and purple skies?
all along walls cratered by the centuries made by men long turned skeleton
lying dead beside the rotting gelatin of a once-known relative
perhaps the last gnash of teeth they ever saw
as the battle-axe swung through the air and split them in two
one at a time or maybe two for one
we still have two for one
at brightly coloured restaurants by underpaid saints
maybe a tradition left over from battles lost & won
“Can I help you, sir?”
“Probably not.”
“….”
People never know what to do or say when someone deviates from the script. The If you think about it it, we’re only given an allotment of, let me be generous here, ten sentences or phrases a week. Can I help you? Sir, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave. Would you like fries with that? Good idea, boss! Oh…don’t say that…you look great! I love you too. I won’t. I will. Take care. Can you say hello for me?
“Are you okay, sir?”
“Yes. I am. I’m sorry.”
“You’re crying.”
“I am.”
“Would you like something to eat?”
“No, I think I’m gonna go now.”
“Hang on. Where do I know you from?”
“Um. I’m an altar boy at St. Paul’s Anglican in Hudspeth Country.”
“That’s my church! I’m there each Sunday! I thought I knew you. What’s a Hudspeth Country boy doing in El Paso?”
“What’s an El Paso girl doing going to church in Sierra Blanca?”
“Our church burned down last year.”
“I didn’t know there were that many death metal bands in the desert.”
She giggled. She actually got my joke. Norwegian Death Metal bands had been burning churches down since the early 90s. Some of them were even killing each other. I didn’t care about death metal. I just knew that I felt less lonely when she laughed at my joke.
“When’s your next break?”
“Gimme two minutes.” Her cheeks were flushed.
No, I didn’t fuck her. I told her who my foster Father was. I told her I’d love to see her again. She told me her name was Bianca. She was fourteen. She went to El Paso High School. She told me she liked music that sounded deliberately broken. I didn’t know what that meant.
She kissed me first, not the other way around. Our lips fit into each other’s like keys into locks. We wanted to. We did. It just didn’t seem right to lose one’s virginity in a Pontiac Sunfire in a McDonald’s parking lot in El Paso, Texas. I didn’t know much at fourteen but I knew you should lose your virginity in a bed.
We sat in her car in the parking lot of El Paso, Texas and kissed till dawn. She had a shift at eight that morning but she didn’t care.
I never saw Bianca again. Guided by Voices have a song on an album called Self-Inflicted Ariel Nostalgia I can’t hear now without a tinge of nostalgia.
PS: My foster father, who is the head priest at St Paul’s Anglican Church in Hudspeth Country, Texas is an hyopcite evil devilman who rapes children. Now that you know this information, if you try to conceal it you will be committing sin in the eyes of GOD to help a deeply troubled MAN who needs not a flock but a cell.
III History Assignment on The Dissolution of the Monasteries
The Monasteries were not torched or crushed by angry men but unfeeling ones. Following orders. The Nuremburg excuses. “I was just following orders, sir.”
Men following orders. From the ones who torched Ireland to the one who dragged screaming Jews into ovens. Just following orders. Men following orders. Surely there’s an order that comes from deeper inside us that tells us not to do these things to our fellow people?
Then why Hitler?
Why Stalin?
Mao?
That idiot who started the Taiping Rebellion cuz he thought Jesus was his brother (about 1800 years too late, moron).
Genghis Khan?
Richard I of England? Also known as Richard the Lionheart, the only British ruler to ever get an addition after his name that wasn’t some bland number, was said to be one of the bravest warriors of his time. But he wasn’t a very good king. He once said he would sell all of England if he could find a buyer. His sole aim in life was to take back the Holy Land for the Christians. He came closer than anybody else ever did, but Emperor Saladin repelled every single one of his attacks.
Richard I of England lying in dead repose.
Saladinus, by Cristofano dell'Altissimo 1568, roughly 400 yrs after Saladin died
Richard left the Holy Land brokenhearted, with Jerusalem within sight but his mutinous French knights refusing to fight. He couldn’t win without them and they knew it. And they told him they had no wish to die day. Not even a little curious about what lies behind Door #99, or whatever your number is. Everyone gets a different one. Like is both like money and happiness that way. We each get our own allotment. And when your number is up…
Emperor Saladin sent an envoy with a letter giving Richard his due as a fighter, commander, and military genius. The letter ended with the words there is no one I would rather have lost my lands to than you. Always assuming I would have to lose my lands at all.
Now I don’t believe in this new trend I’ll call “Presentism,” which is judging people’s values, attitudes, biases, and behavior by the standards of today. But a man who enjoys killing is always going to be evil, is always going to have eyes that flicker with the orange of a stove. Is always going to be a man with hell inside of him. A man on fire from the inside.
Genocide and slavery. A God who CAN stop these things but DOESN’T is a cruel, nasty, terrible being and we should fear him. Because when a God like THAT comes to judge us, we will feel a pain and hurt that makes every other kind of pain feel like pleasure by comparison.
I bit part of my tongue off once while having a seizure. I was on my hands and knees spitting bright red blood onto the sidewalk as people scurried past. People God made. I was begging them to call an ambulance but they either couldn’t understand me because I’d bitten my tongue in half or they didn’t want to get involved.
This is God’s flock.
David Benatar’s Better Never To Have Never Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence cites study after study after study in which people routinely overrate their own lives. People who live in damp mouldy apartments, dying of lung problems, routinely rate their lives over 7, usually because of some abstract future they see themselves being transported to. In the 1990s, beloved parody newspaper The Onion did a poll of their most beloved joke of the decade, which was this: 75% of Americans Retirement Plan Involves Stumbling Across Suitcase Full of Money.
In 2015, this is no longer a joke.
It is impossible to live any life without being harmed in some way. Existence causes harm.
Existence causes harm. Why don’t we let ourselves admit this? Why do let we tyrants rule us? There are more of us than there are of them.
The Dissolution of Monasteries by Henry VIII was a means for making money. Henry VIII let some monasteries stay where they were. Out of kindness? Cuz God told him to? No! Cuz they had enough gold to stay alive and stay put.
The others he burned. Thousands and thousands. Imagine the screaming. All for the Church of England. How made up does that sound, eh? The Church of Mars. The Church of Henry. The Church of Oliveri. Oh wait, there’s already one of those. My priest foster father is a repressed sexual sadist who has harmed people. I don’t have proof but I can see it when he looks at me. There is the orange flicker of fire in his eyes. When he came to Earth, hell came with him. My “father” is on fire inside and I will kill him the first chance I get.
If this guy came to your house and dared to “tax” you to pay for his sixth divorce, would you pay him? Or tell him and his knights to go fuck themselves?
It is heroic to refuse to beg for mercy. It is heroic to tell one’s own king to fuck off, knowing full well the sentence will be death.
Beside, who could trust a man dressed like that? And after ALL that horseshit he went through to separate the Catholic Church and form his own vanity church, he got divorced FIVE MORE TIMES. At that point, you start to see that the problem is Henry VIII, not his pliant wives.
PS: Did you you know they recently found a shitload of money in Ireland on Derrynaflan Island in Tipperary County?1 Those monks knew they were dead anyway, they just didn’t want to give money to a tyrant.
Giving money to a tyrant is like giving beer to Kid Rock. Fuck you, Kid Rock, you fakeass trailer park pimp. Buy your own fucking beer.
The Tipperary riches were found in 2022 by a lone guy with a metal detector. I don’t know if he gets to keep the money. In England, you don’t get to keep it. You STILL have to give it up to some fuckwit who is probably related by blood to Henry VIII.
A man interested in history found something so valuable it doesn’t even have a fucking price yet. And he’ll probably have to give it up because he’s not a real historian. I don’t know Irish law. I say his retirement plan worked out pretty well, wouldn’t you? Stumbling across a monastery containing millions (I’m talking USD, war daddy bucks, so you know it’s real money). Good for him.
IV It’s My Party & I’ll Die If I Want To
I’m having people over tonight.
Me. Michael Oliveri.
Haven’t seen ‘em since college. Their lives for now are just squares of perfectly posed pictures on social neworking that we all know are nothing like their real lives. Yet we all do it. Even the “I’m sooooo sleepy photos” in bed are staged. Who took the photo? An alert dog? We know you took the damn picture.
This is a rite of passage. It never goes well. But I’m 36. I’m out of the army. I have my shit together, allegedly. It has to be done. No more fake plans. No more Canadian “hey come by sometimes.”
I’ve got Maker’s Mark, I’ve got Bulleit. All the thin bottles that remind me of Cutty Sark. I don’t drink but I like the look of a good bottle. Maker’s Mark looks like a melting candle top. Not exactly genius, but slick. Or neato! As we early 90s Canadian kids would exclaim.
Look at that thing. I almost wanna drink it despite being sober for over half a decade. Something weird about drinking a bourbon bottle that looks pregnant though, wouldn’tcha say?
“You Canadians are the best at fake plans,” a British girl said to me once.
I knew exactly what she meant but I wanted to hear it from her, so I folded his arms, feigning confusion. “Huh? What do you mean?”
“Y’always say shit like ‘you’ve got to come to the cottage some weekend!’ or ‘you simply HAVE to meet Walter-Lynn! He’s starting to crawl!’” You hint at plans that never, EVER happen. I don’t know why, but it’s a Canadian thing. Like ‘eh’ or ‘sorry.’ Except it’s not polite to make vague plans and never follow through. It’s the opposite.”
She’s right. 100% correct.
With these fake Canadian Plans I won’t meet Walter-Lynn, my friend Donald’s son, until he graduates chef school, carrying a sirloin steak over his shoulder. Either that or I’ll catch him at his funeral. Car accident at 52. At least I finally got around to meeting him. His face looks flatter than I expected. Is that the airbag or just the way he looked? Would it be rude to ask?
I didn’t go to my foster father’s funeral. I was getting a tattoo. One to remind me to never be like him. My step-brother sent me a shitty postcard about it: Your absence was noted, Mike. But otherwise I didn’t hear anything.
Walter-Lynn? That’s his first name. Jeez. What the fuck is wrong with his parents? Is this some Boy Named Sue shit? Trying to toughen him up by giving him a name guaranteed to get him an ass kicking every day from kindergarten to Grade 12? Fuck these hyphen names. Jean-Phillipe. Mark-Marion. Fuck-You.
With names like these the kids are either all doomed or they will form a cult. I’m not trying to be a smartass. I actually used to think the Fibonacci sequence was how dolphins spoke to each other. I’m an idiot.
But I know this: the schoolyard never changes. Recess doesn’t get kinder. Walter-Lynn will grow up to hate the world because his parents gave him a name that people simply will not accept. It’s a name for a dickhead. Like Sloan. Or Frasier. In trying to show the world how unique their kid is, they’ve only ensured their son will be on the losing team of this Heaven-Hell thing my Dad believed in early. And Walter-Lynn will be on that losing football team every night. There will be no great comeback to the pounding tom-toms of “My Hero” by Foo Fighters.
I haven’t said a word in two hours. My guests are either idiots or greedy corporate shitheads. How did I ever run with such filth? How did I sleep in dorm rooms with these fucking pigs?
“Wow. This party blows homeless goats,” I hear somebody say.
“What the fuck is wrong with Mike? He looks like a psychopath.”
“Why don’t you all get the fuck out of here before I shoot each of you in the fucking face? Tyler? Derek? Sarah? Donald? Phil?”
They’re staring at me, waiting for the joke to kick in. There is no joke. I unclick the safety and put the gun under my chin and stare at them until they put their drinks down and leave. Tyler actually has the balls to finish his beer first. I kinda like him more for doing that. In a different world maybe we’d be friends.
Thirty seconds later my apartment is empty and I fall into bed with a nice, deep buzz. Not alcohol. Somebody gave me one of those CBD gummies earlier. I think it was Tyler? The room is spinning so I kick one sock off, an old alcoholic trick that reduces the spins by half. Try it. You won’t regret it. Or if both your socks are already off, put one foot on the floor while keeping the other foot on the bed for the same effect.
I mean, if monks and kings couldn’t get along, what chance do a bunch of overeducated assholes? Or sports fans? Or guys named Mike Oliveri and Walter-Lynn? Or Sarah, who never liked me anyway?
Why didn’t Donald and his wife just name their kid Urinal Cake and wait for the whole wide world to piss on him?
What I would like to know most of all is how a community of ostensibly peaceful Irish monks were able to amass such riches. We’re talking millions and millions. We all know by now that praying for money doesn’t cause it to fall from the sky. Is it
possible that a monastery full of ostensibly “peaceful” 6th Century Irish monks were also warriors? If not, how did they amass an amount of riches now considered “priceless”? How did they just happen to hide it in a monastery on Derrynaflan Island in County Tipperary? They knew what they had. They knew they were rich. Good for them to give the finger to Cromwell and his psychotic band of followers. Those men make the SS seem almost reasonable.
Maybe everybody has a duality to them. Maybe I’m a bad person too. Tyrannical.
Fuck this. I can’t sleep. Not with my head spinning like this. I head downstairs to my motorcycle and pretty soon I’m doing 95/mph in a 55/mph zone. Just kill me. It won’t be dark. That’s what people don’t get. Darkness is something. When you die there’s nothing. Not darkness. NOTHING.
So bring it on. Where’s this nothing?
100/mph….
105/mph…
110/mph…
115/mph and the motor cuts out.
It’s called a governor. They put them on modern engines so you can’t go faster than a certain delimited speed. I can’t even die right tonight so I say fuck it and go home.
V L’appel du vide
L’appel du vide is a French term (duh) that pretty much looks like what it means. The appeal of the void. That feeling of seeing an oncoming train and have a sick but momentary urge to jump in front of it.
Earlier today I switched lanes without signaling and some guy in the left lane yelled out his passenger window “WHAT THE HELL’S WRONG WITH YOU, ASSHOLE?”
I shrugged and grinned at the man like we were old pals. I was at at fault. But still, I felt the temperature of my blood rise. That’s tyranny, isn’t it?
I knew I had a weapon and the opportunity to kill that man. I’d catch up with him. We were on I-10 with no turnoffs or off-ramps for the next 30 miles.
But I didn’t kill him. That’s the difference, I hope, between the unhappy and the truly evil. I could have killed that man but I chose not to.
The call of the void. What curious person doesn’t sometimes think “hey, I wonder what would happen if I swerved full speed into that oncoming truck?” or “what if I jumped in front of that subway car?”
I bet l’appel du vide explains a lot of seemingly unexplainable suicides. Totally normal people, just suddenly mesmerized by the call of death, and taking the jump.
“He was totally fine. Then he just stabbed himself in the head with a barbecue fork. It doesn’t make sense. The barbecue was his idea.” And it will forever be a mystery to those who haven’t heard of l’appel du vide. There are plenty of calls out there. You know. Jack London shit.
The Call of the Wild.
The Call of the Void.
The Call From Your Ex.
By the time I caught up to the classically American fatass in the minivan, the one who hadn’t approved of my deceleration technique, I wasn’t angry anymore.
I’d put on my favourite song by a band called souled American (the capital ”S” is deliberately lowercase, the song was “Before Today”). I had it just fucking cranked. You could probably hear the damn thing in Sante Fe.
A song before a voice
A chance before a choice
A lamp before a light
Stuck with today before tonight
The spool before a wind
Found after a find (for years I misheard this lyric as “found that girl of mine”)
A youth before a past
At least before at last…
If you kill someone while a song this beautiful is playing, you are a bad person. Yes, I know it’s got that singing saw Neutral Milk Hotel thing, but it’s not a ripoff. That Neutral Milk Hotel allbum, the only one anyone listens to, came out in 1996. So did Notes campfire by souled American, which has “Before Today” on it. I seriously doubt either band was aware of the other.
Songs are like viruses. They occupy minds like cities occupy space. Songs are contagious. Like fear. Like violence. Like laughter. Like love.
Love. I haven’t dated in four years. My most recent girlfriend broke up with me because she said he had a certain look on my face when I woke up and it frightened her. How do you argue with that? I’ll try to look more cheerful three milliseconds after waking up each morning, dear, I promise. I am who I am. That’s why I’m alone. I’m not gonna change so you’ll like me better because then you won’t be liking Mike. You’ll be liking the performance of Mike that I give every time I see you. And I’m not an actor.
I’d rather be dead than pretend to be some other Mike the rest of my life.
Hell, right now even death doesn’t want me. My fucking motorcycle tops out at 115/mph. You can’t even kill yourself the way you want to in this world.
I’ll find a way. Nothing cliched either. I’m talking unique. The Tsar Bomba of suicides. Talked about for years afterwards. I wanna go out big.
Maybe I’ll use a power sander to sand down the bottom of a beach umbrella to a single sharp point and shove it up my ass, then down walk the highway bleeding to death. As a protest. As atonement for all the kids my foster father raped and ruined. I’ve always known I’d die on the road. I was born on the road. I will die on the road. Morotcycle or beach umbrella, I will die on the road.
You know I really did love her. They cut my fucking wedding ring off to give me the MRI that time I fell off my motorcycle. I was only going 65 mph at the time. So I lived. Now I have a limp.
No metal in the MRI machine, they said.
Fuck you, I gurgled, blood waterfalling out of my mouth. Don’t. Please let me keep this memory. PLEASE.”
They cut it off. I screamed. They threw it in the garbage. Shut up, they said. Yes sir, I said immediately. I submit quickly to authority. I don’t know if that’s from my foster father or from my stint in the Army. But the MRI man reminded me of my real father. I didn’t have my contacts in but there was a familarity to the shoulders. When men remind you of your father, you sit up straighter, want to do right by them, make them proud, even if you hated you fucking foster father.
“You gotta let it go, son.”
That’s when I realized my real dad actually was in the room. A man I love. A real man, a real dad. The father I would never kill.
Even though now I have nothing left of her,my ex-wife, I gained some semblance of my father’s respect. When you get to be my age, between 35 and 40, almost nothing matter more than the respect of your father, or the father figure in your life. He came to see me in the hospital. And I know how much he hates this city. But he came. And he came for me.
So fuck my ex-wife. I mean forget her, not fuck her. We fucked enough. She’s a ghost. She’s done with me. It’s my turn to be done with her.
I was given a clean bill of health and my motorcycle was okay. This was at Presbyterian Medical Center om Sante Fe.I had no memory of the fall. The person who signd my release form handed me my keys.
“Down in the parking lot,” she said. “Space B12, Like the vitamin.” They treat you like a retarded six-year old in the hospital. Did they think I wouldn’t recognize my own bike?
We went to a diner. The first time I ever hear “Runaway Train” by Soul Asylum I was in a diner called Squire’s with my father.
“You have to move on, Mike,” he was saying. “She did.”
Bad logic. I’ve had ex-girlfriends move to New York City. Does that mean I should to New York City? But he was right, ultimately.
I’ll move on when I can. When I’m ready. If that means never then that means never. I’m nothing in my soul if not obsessive. I said in sickness and in health. Did they think I was fucking kidding?
Anyway, I have $14 000 from my time in the Army and I have a motorcycle and America in front of me. Where to go?
I don’t wanna go to Las Vegas. I quit drinking years ago and I hate gambling because it involves no skill whatsoever. I’m not risking my shirt over the way some hungover morons handle a ball or a puck.
I got out of the army with my name smirched, if that’s a word. It wasn’t besmirched, if that’s what you’re thinking. It was intact. I’d killed a sniper 500 yards away with a Remington Model 700 SPS Tactical AAC-SD on makeshift tripod of Iraqi stone blocks.
They can’t say I didn’t do my duty. I have nowhere to go and no one to see. I talk on FaceTime with my old army buddies sometimes. I have a little inside joke I like to play that my buddies never notice. See, one of my favourite bands is Guided by Voices. In 2010, he lead singer/songwriter recorded an album called We All Got Out of the Army. My favourite track on there is called “Talking Dogs,” I like to put it the whole record to see if someone notices. Because we are a bunch of talking dogs. We still have our dog tages. Braggarts and bullshitters with PTSD. No one ever notices. Not ever.
There is this one girl I like. She’s in Arizona. I subscribe to an old American magazine called Arizona Highways. It features page after page of gorgeous photos of…well…Arizona highways. I think that girl I like lives there now. Flagstaff maybe? Tucson? Mesa?
I paid for dinner and hugged my real Dad goodbye. So I have $13 965, a backpack with a journal, a novel or two, and several copies of Arizona Highways. I also have a new motorcycle with tread as thick as a tree and I’m gonna drive America until the tread comes off. I will keep the brand to myself, just as I keep my assortment of random ethics to myself. My own private religion.
Back when I lived and worked Oregon, where Ken Kesey wrote his magnum opus longhand Sometimes a Great Notion2, that girl called me by my name. I didn’t even know she knew it. When she said “Mike” I think my heart stopped for like five whole seconds. But she moved away. I suppose I should just admit it now…I am going to look for her.
They always move away. What’s out there that’s so enticing? The whole world’s the same. There’s a Subway shop every five feet. Stay where you are. Don’t go trying to find yourself a life. Make your life. Keep your castle. Erect a moat. Stop leaving. Stop leaving me.
Anyway, she knew my name. I don’t know how she knew it, I never told it to her. That means she inquired after me. She asked somebody what my name was. And now she’s out there somewhere in America. She might be older. She might be married. She might be dead inside from a life of working at Wal-Mart.
But, as Robert Penn Warren says, I know she is beautiful forever.
VI Hell Awaits?
This is not a novel. It is a motorcycle diary, but the antithesis of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If I wrote a book that smug and self-satisfied I think I’d deliberately drive off the Pacific Coast Highway and into the ocean. I tried to read it. I really did. It is unbearable. If you ever see the man who wrote it, in Wyoming or Nevada or wherever, on his stupid meditation motorcycle, do the world a favour and run him down. I’ll take the blame. I really will. I’ll say I was driving. For you will have done the world a great service. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Could a more pretentious title exist?
There are medieval cuneiforms with more modest titles, and that was an age when stoic monks and sisters were dragged outside by the hair and put to stone & sword for no reason other than there was a new king in town. A new king in the land. In the counties. Coming for you and your money and your thatched roof with torches aflame.
Let's play a game called The King is Coming to Dinner. He’s not actually coming to eat, he won’t touch your swill, but he’s coming to your house. Now.
There better be a coin in that hand of yours worthy of his crown. Something Anglican. In those days in Britain a Roman coin could be found in every few inches of dirt. A Roman coin was a goddamn insult to a king. Would you hand your king a goddamn Budweiser bottlecap? Well, I would, but that’s because I don’t give a shit.
I’d hand my President a used condom. I’d hand my king a piece of dog shit. If he’s gonna kill you anyway, why not? But you? You’ve a family. You’ve a thatched roof you’d like to keep intact. You have things you want to do with your life. So you better think fast.
The king won’t dismount. The king doesn’t dismount for peasants and serfs, are you joking? You must approach without looking up at him. Eye contact means certain death. (The actor Mike Myers has been known to declare on set that people not look him in the eye. If they do, he fires them. What a fucking asshole. By the way, how’s the career, Mike? Haven’t seen you in a while. Maybe people don’t like working with actors who act like British kings. Ever think of that? Ever care about the little ones since you exploded into a neutron star?
Kings were different though. They were supposed to be closer to God. Like the Pope was before Henry VIII decided he wanted a divorce. He’s closer to Lucifer too but you prolly shouldn’t tell him that. Most Kings have the temper of five-year old boys. Many Kings have actually been five-year old boys.
“And what would your grace suggest we do about the approaching Spanish Armada of 600 ships?”
“Goo goo!”
“Excellent decision. Right away your grace.”
But not that king is outside your door mounted on the best looking steed in England. Would you take your cap in your hand and beg for mercy? Or would you be a man and tell him you ain’t go no fuckin’ money and to come back later? You can’t get blood from a stone. It is heroic to not beg for your life from a man who does not value yours.
And if he’s a king with a sense of justice and humour, he will laugheth and let you go.
Because first it giveth then it taketh away. Money. Alcohol. Even power.
If he’s a typical king though, that is to say a cunt, he’ll take that blood from a stone analogy as a good idea and have his men dash your skull off a rock until your brains are streaming out your ears while your family watches.
This is the fear in me.
The fear of tyranny.
NO man should have that much power.
No man.
But many men do.
Who gives them such power?
Us meeker men. The meek ones who are supposed to inherit the Earth someday. Hate to burst your bubble, piss on your parade, but we already have inherited it. They just have new terms for serfdom and slavery. 6-month unpaid internships just for the privilege of being near a guy who wears a turtleneck and swears his idea will change the world. At least until his funding period runs out. Minimum wage entry jobs until you’re 40 because you’re too restlesss to stay at one place because you can feel the great world humming out there and you want to fucking see it, not sit under flourescent lights and slowly die while filling out forms with guys named Dwight who go behind your back weekly and say terrible things about your “enthusiasm” and “performance.”
It’s been said that LBJ (the idiot who lucked into the Presidency when Kennedy got a moonroof when the top of his skull was shot off in Dallas) has his lackeys give him updates while he was on the shitter. Serving their country, nose wrinkled, pretending not to smell the shit of the most powerful man in the world.
It’s happened elsewhere. Eunuchs would prepare the Chinese emperor’s chamber pot and wait for him to literally shit and then get off the pot. It was considered the highest honor in all of China to be a dickless man who carried the emperor’s shit. And learned religious men say with straight faces that hell awaits? How much worse can it fucking get? How is this not hell we’re in right now? Don‘t heaven and hell share the same geographical space? Right Dad?
Well, I say fuck that. And fuck you. I’d rather make minimum wage at KFC than carry your fuckin’ feces. If you wanna carry a nation you can carry your own shit. Mister emperor or king or President or Premier. I’m not your surrogate toilet. Learn to flush like the rest of us.
Would saying this to a king that result in certain death? You never know.
Some people like it when you disrespect them.
The emperor’s whores were guarded day and night by eunuchs in the Forbidden City. They were inmates. Never allowed to leave, EVER. And hell awaits? (By the way, I used to listen to this album to piss my faster father pedophile pederast priest off.)3
Here’s how I killed him:
You’re really in for it now, son. Locking the door behind him, for the 487th beating. He had no reason to think this one would go any different. But I had reason. (I HATED when he called me “son.” I am my father’s son. I am not the son of some pederast pedophile.) I told you what would happen if you turned in that report that says I jack off to homosexual pornography. I told you what would happen.
Ah, but he didn’t count on one thing. He’d forgotten that time waits for no man. I wasn’t little Mikey anymore. I was Michael Oliveri and I had twenty pounds of muscle on him. And rage equal to the white-hot intensity of ten thousand undiscovered white suns.
I broke his nose, his jaw, his femur, his ankle, and his orbital bone.
Then I sliced his cock and balls off and slipped them into his pocket and left him to bleed to death on the kitchen floor, that fucking kitchen where he hit me more times than there are numbers for. Where he expected his 488th victory and was left lifeless. I didn’t give him an inch. No marks on my face. He didn’t land a single punch.
How’d I get away with it? Easy. It was 1993 and the investigation, if you can ever call it that, was headed up by the Galveston Police Department. The old man had moved there a few years earlier. Better for his lungs, the doctor said. Fuck that. More like a longer boardwalk to scope out. Wider territory for a predator.
The Galveston Police Department like their good ol’ oil boys white and I had a good friend on the Gulf oil rigs fake a timecard for me. The day my foster father, church Father was murdered in his Galveston kitchen I was 130 miles away on the Perdido oil rig.
Perdido?
Yes Officer. It’s the deepest rig working in the Gulf.
How deep we talkin’ here?
It’s the deepest floating oil platform in the world. It can work at a water depth of about 2450 meters.
And this is for Shell?
Yes sir, operated by the Shell Oil Company in the Gulf of Mexico.
Is there anyone who can confirm you were on the rig all day, without leaving?
Yes sir. My boss John Haley can tell ya. I’d get the name of some of my co-workers but honestly, sir, they all sound like Deigo or Fernando Diaz. Hard to tell ‘em apart. They kinda…idiots.
They liked that. White cops secretly love it when you say racist shit around them. They get to nod because they are “gathering information” when really they are agreeing with you.
So yeah, I killed my Dad. And I liked it. Not as much as I loved my wife. But pretty close.
But this was supposed to be a story about civilization. Where was I?
The Galveston Police let me go after a 2-hour interview. 2 years later and DNA evidence would’ve hooked me and booked me for good. That’s still a possibility. Virginal cops trying to solve cold cases. I try not to think about that.
So let’s go back to the broken monasteries and churches of England and elsewhere. Stalin crushed the church in Soviet Russia because the Tiflis Seminary kicked him out for his revolutionary activities. Interesting that a man who had a physical defect and therefore a very difficult stint in Siberia would be so fucking keen on sending whoever the hell he wanted there, for bullshit reasons, for reasons none other than he fucking COULD. Well, it turns out because he got himself a cushy admin job. He was always finding such jobs for himself.
When that man came to Earth, did hell come with him?
Or it is instead the case that when man came to Earth, hell came with him?
This is hell. My pedo-preist fake father taught me that, but accidentally. I had to force it out of him. Before he slapped me. Didn’t hurt a bit. Woke me up like a cup of coffee eventually would when I finally said fuck it and made one myself.
It has been said that if you saw Stalin under a certain light (and no doubt his second wife saw it, for she chose suicide over spending another night with that evil cretin), his eyes glowed orange, almost like the way you can see fire inside the portholes that separate the hallways from the fires in the deepest hulls of great ships. I don’t mean his eyes flickered, but if you looked at him directly, which few of his men ever did, for fear of being labelled an “enemy of the state,” you’d see a man on fire from the inside. A man was from hell, just like my foster daddy, or like men who mock down castles and knock down towers. Cromwell. Zizek.
Zizek may have fought for we call “the right side,” but no man that good at killing can ever have bloodless hands…and what makes his story all the more amazing is he fought half his battles half blind, and the second half entirely blind. Zizek was known as “The Blind General.” He was never defeated in battle. That impresses me, though I think I’d decline to give a man that fearsome a coin just because he asked me.
Zizek stuck his religious rivals on pikes? He was from hell.
And so now if you wish to tour pleasant England now, how to do the Coast to Coast walk if you like, although any idiot can start at one side and walk to the other, a man named Alfred Wainright became wealthy for his travelogue entitled A Coast to Coast Walk:
Dry as a piece of toast with nothing on it, the book is still not entirely without its (once again, very dry) British witticisms. Of the route approaching Whitwell Moor, Wainright wrote “those who believe the world is flat will be mightily encouraged in this section.”
In England, this is the height of hilarity. This is not just LOL. It is ROFL.
Maybe you wanna see Hadrian’s wall, as north as the Romans ever got they say (not true). The Romans made it as far north as Scotland, and even made another wall. It still stands today. You can’t find Roman coins that easily anymore, but those two Roman walls, built 40 years apart, still stand.
This is Hadrian’s Wall:
And this is Antonine’s:
LOL. I wouldn’t call that second thing a”wall” would you? I’d wouldn’t even call it a failed wall. It bears no resemblance to the thing it tried to be. But neither do I.
Built within 40 years of each other. 100 miles apart. I think it’s safe to say Hadrian’s is the superior wall. Antonine’s looks closer to a retaining wall than something meant to keep out the White Walkers. I’m speaking of the Scottish, not the Game of Thrones zombies who wreak havoc on the living.
A real Scotsman or Scotswoman or Scotsperson would take one look at this oddly attired jerk and burst out laughing. In Game of Thrones, they are apparently the nexus of all evil and death.
NIGHT KING: Join us! You won’t be paid or fed and you’ll stay dead forever, but join us anyway!
IDIOTS: Sure thing, Night King! We trust you to keep us safe!
Huh. Looks like fun. What are the spoils of this war? All the snow and ice you ever wanted?
Anyway, Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin had said that he modelled the Wall in Game of Thrones, the Wall that separates humans from “the others” as the books calls them, or “the White Walkers” as the TV show calls them, after Hadrian’s Wall. In GoT, the Wall is supposed to be a colossal fortification which stretches for 100 leagues, from one sea to another, but it is badly understaffed. This was apparently a problem with Hadrian’s Wall as well, and even more so with Antonine’s.
Hadrian’s Wall was constructed in 121 AD and was 10 feet tall when finished. Sentries and centurions patrolled the top, it was so wide. Parts of it are still wide, while others are as thin as a small penis. After Hadrian’s wall was finished the Romans spent the next 20 years decimating the population 100 miles north of the wall, so then they began construction on Antonine Wall, which ran 63 kilometres running east-west from the Firth of Forth to whatever the hell is on the other side of England. The Cliffs of Dover? Certainly not the Cliffs of Moher.
After Hadrian’s was finished the Romans spent the next 20 years decimating the population 100 miles north of the wall, so then they began construction on Antonine Wall, which ran 63 kilometres running east-west from the Firth of Forth to whatever the hell is on the other side of England. The Cliffs of Dover? Certainly not the Cliffs of Moher.[3]
Those are in Ireland. I’ve been. They’re almost impossibly beautiful, sliced lengthwise by the Atlantic. Centuries of all that washing crashing sawing. I see a place like that and something inside me understands that the world holds secrets we weren’t meant to know. Cormac McCarthy says otherwise:
The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
Well, who says I want to dictate the terms of my own fate? I’m the one who takes his hands off the handlebars when the governor on my motorcycle kicks in at 115 miles per hour. And I do this knowing full well I will never build a wall to last centuries. I do this knowing full well the rain will erode the deeds of my life. I do this will complete content. Because I know that certain secrets of the world are forever hidden. I know that the world doesn’t belong to me. I know that the world does not bring a single living thing into it without eventually destroying it. So don’t tell me by choosing the way I want to die, flying through the air off my motorcycle on some lonesome stretch of Interstate, that I am not dictating the terms of my own fate. Don’t tell me superstition will drag me down. I was raised by a priest. I live by superstition. I pray to a God I will never see or hear. I pray to Saint Anthony when I lose things I am fond of.
I didn’t pray to him when I lost my wife though. You only pray to Anthony when recovery is plausible. I knew I’d lost her forever. I knew there was a better chance of me building a wall to last ten centuries than seeing her again. She haunts me like a ghost. She hijacks my thoughts. Her silence is like the silence of God. I simply trust that the silence means she is out there somewhere. Breathing. Happy.
Now…where were we?
As yes, waiting outside a monastery to see if bloodshed or kindness will be doled out.
The king would have his men check the building for signs of black magic, Paganism, and such. If anything like that is found, ALL will be slaughtered.
Cuneiforms burned. Knowledge carefully handled and passed down through the singing years, burned and lost forever.
If one knight – men now known for their education – were to see something he did not like, like a monk with fancy handwriting’s manuscripts – or simply felt like killing…the whole place would be deleted from the world. Burned and raped and pillaged.
Manuscripts, monks, sisters, walls, all weighted with the candles and camaraderie of centuries…built on the bones of forgotten or misremembered monks and nameless crones because women couldn’t possibly write…am I right?
I am not. I am kidding. Some of the smartest people who ever lived, mostly mathematicians, were and are women. Anyone can learn words and language. We made that shit up. Math is the real truth of the universe. Or did we make that up too?
Decades of shared bunks by “celibate” monks…
Beds shared by sisters who brought each other to silent, shivering orgasm.
But you can’t say with a straight face this isn’t a holy place
Devoted to something higher
Brighter than fire
Stronger than desire
Continents away from gunfire…
Maybe the king, no more than sixteen years old, has grown bored by his duties
and wants to go hunting and therefore declares this monastery a clean one!
An exemplary one for the Church of England
Having seen no signs of the Pope he now has a problem with
cuz the fat prick wouldn’t let his Grandpa divorce his dumb bitch wife so he killed Thomas More and a few more to make a point & started The Church of England cuz fuck anybody who wouldn’t let him fuck who he wanted to fuck did not believe in the God he needed to have.
The God he needed to have was a God who would let him do whatever he wanted.
VII Off to War
I went off to war in 2004. Iraq. No guns. Nobody to shoot. Nothing but car bombs, blowing men into what resembles soup on fire.
One Iraqi sniper waited so long and so still in a tree that he took out twelve of our guys before I spotted him. I’m not bragging, I just found him first. I am bragging when I say I shot him right in his left eyeball. I wish I could have heard it, but we were five football fields apart. I bet it sounded like a fresh towel being placed on another fresh towel. Floof.
The Private on guard that night was lined up against the wall and was just about to get shot for “dereliction of duty.”
I thought, what the fuck? This isn’t WWII. Dereliction of duty?
He’d soiled himself and was begging on his knees. Army regulations state that you cannot execute your own men unless they are standing. A proud army tradition. The Private didn’t know this, he was just scared. He thought his life was still ahead of him.
“No Captain! I swear to God! It was like the tree just woke up & fuckin’ started shooting! It was like a woodpecker o-or something!”
“TREES DON’T KILL PEOPLE, PRIVATE SMITH!”
“What about widowmakers?” I asked casually, lighting a cigarette like I didn’t give a fuck, but I liked Private Smith and I was trying to save his life.
Captain Collard turned and looked at me. “WIDOWMAKERS?” This was just how he spoke. Well, he didn’t speak so much as scream.
VIII More Heroes & Tyrants or Saving Private Smith
Sergeant Oliveri could hear the impatience and disgust in Captain Collard’s voice, so he decided to help out, though he very much doubted he could prevent Private Smith from being hauled up against a wall and shot for dereliction of duty. Might as well try and hold back the tide. Smith would find a way to get himself killed. He was just too stupid to survive an eminently survivable war.
It was obvious that there was a sniper in that tree, not goddamn Woody Woodpecker waiting to fucking peck someone to death while emitting that obnoxious huh-huh-huh-HAH-huh, so utterly American in its earworm ability to get stuck in your head and never, ever fucking leave. “The Blue Danube” never managed to do that, nor “Moonlight Sonata” but give an American some Bugs Bunny or Woody Woodpecker and it’s all they can hear for the next day and a half.
“What about widowmakers?” Oliveri asked, aware of how futile this all was. Even if his saved Smith’s life today, they’d find a reason to throw him out of a plane with a faulty parachute the next day. Oops. Imagine that letter home.
May 12, 2005
Private John Smith died serving his country, Mrs. Smith. He also pissed off his Captain so much that we threw him out of a plane knowing his parachute wouldn’t open. We hope you understand. You raised him, after all. Annoying little fucker, ain’t he? Still, he died a hero.
- Captain Heathrow H. Collard
United States Army Corps
The Captain spun and stared at Oliveri, more surprised than angry, for Oliveri spoke less than most deaf people. Oliveri said about five words a week. When people like that speak people listen. The Captain nodded assent. As in “go on.”
“A widowmaker, sir, is a type of rotted tree in areas where there is much forestry activity. Often redwood areas where the trees are as old as a thousand years. With so many men with chainsaws cutting down trees, the vibrations shake loose the dead trees, and when the dead branches fall a good hundred feet and lands on a man’s head, they kill him instantly.”
“WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH ANYTHING, SERGEANT?”
“The fact that trees do, and can, in fact, kill people, sir.”
The Captain was impressed. Unlike most stupid men, he enjoyed learning new facts. Of course, this didn’t change the fact that twelve soldiers in his company had been killed by what seemed to be a fucking tree but was actually a sniper.
“HUH,” the Captain rubbed his beard. “WHERE DID YOU COME BY SUCH INFORMATION, SERGEANT?”
“I grew up in Canada, then moved to Northern Oregon at the age of six, where I spent four or five summers logging. I also spent two summers logging in the redwood section of Humboldt Country. I also spent two summers in British Columbia, which is in Canada. After that I moved to Texas and uh…became an American.”
“CANADA, EH?” The Captain was smiling now. Americans love to make fun of Canadians. It’s like picking on a retarded younger brother. “Yes sir. There are more redwoods there than in Washington State, which is where many people tend to think they are.”
Sergeant Oliveri decided, quite prudently, to omit the fact that he didn’t throw a single axe into a single tree either if those sweet Lost Coast California summers, but instead took part in a cannabis growing-selling operation, which made him more money in two summers than he’s made in five summers in Oregon. There’s a reason people get into growing and selling drugs. It pays more money. And money is freedom. The Feds were closing in on the Humboldt Operation anyway. He just happened to be in the right tavern at the right time when some loose-lipped DEA asshole decided to announce to the whole bar his plans for the summer, not realizing that everyone in that bar was part of the cannabis economy, be it growing, transport, or selling. The dumb shit DEA said the raid was planned for June 10 but nobody is that dumb.
The real raid was likely planned for something closer to June 6 but Oliveri was taking no chances. The entire operation was folded up and hidden away by June 3.
The DEA made their dawn raid at 6:30AM on June 5, all the bells and whistles. A SWAT team, fully armed men screaming. There was even a cop who had only had an hour sleep the night before who “accidentally” pulled the trigger and shot a man he’d be tailing (as in, “pretending to be buddies with”) directly in the heart. The dying man’s last words were “why’d you do that, man?” The incident may have been simply forgotten because this was America and innocent people got shot all the time if not for a book that spend sixteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list called The Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police by a writer named Radley Balko.
Balko had selected the incompetent Humboldt shooting by a “sleepy cop” as his lead-off chapter and it really stuck a chord with the nation. As hard as a chord can be struck by a nation that reads, on average, one book a fucking year. If that. People like to leave out in conspicuous places that one book they read a year but Oliveri doubted very much they finished it. Reading takes a certain devotion. If it takes you longer than a month to read a book then you’re not really reading it, are you?
After that happened, police departments across America demanded weaponry that even the U.S Army or Marines weren’t allowed to have. Honestly though, since they got their toys, rockety launchers and tanks and weaponry even trained Marines aren’t allowed to have, there hasn’t been a single bank robbery like the North Hollywood Shootout that inspired Heat. But,just like a subway line nobody uses, once you give it to them, you can’t take to back. So now we’ve got a nation of cops armed more heavily that US Marines pulling over dentists for doing 75 in a 65 zone. Overkill. That’s America. Do I believe that cop made a mistake and shot his mark accidentally? Not for a second. He wanted to kill him. So he did.
Marines and Army soldiers fight real, organized entities. Not smacked out (or did they like upppers?) dopeheaded bank robbers. Some reports say the two men took phenobarbital to calm down because they were flying higher than kites or The Spirit of Saint Louis as solo pilot Charles Lindbergh made ihis gracefully slow descent into Paris on May 21, 1927, on the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight in the world. I mention this because it was a heroic thing to do.
He’d flown from Long Island, New York, to Paris, France, and won the $25,000 Orteig Prize.
He’d flown across the entire Atlantic Ocean using dead reckoning. A ballsy move. Dead reckoning leaves a LOT of room for error, and each error gets compounded, so Lindbergh easily could have ended up limp burger flaming wreck somewhere in the Azores or Algeria or a watery graveyard also starting with the letter “A’” for the purposes of alliteration.
I’m not a hero. I’m telling a story.
And, because cops are not as well-trained as army, marines, air force, and navy, you’ve got over-adrenalized, under-educated idiots running around SWATTING the wrong houses, shooting dogs, and shooting homeowners because they “didn’t get enough sleep the night before.”
America is a country at war. A war involving no small arms. No guns. All IEDs. Random explosions. Vehicles being blown up with its occupants immediately dying. How do you fight back against that? Well, maybe by equipping your army – your people at war – at least as well as cops in Sacramento and Miami for fuck’s sake. Americans are not more dangerous than terrorists we’ve seen in photographs, serenely staring at the camera, proud of the fact that they are willing to take innocent lives because it means they can fuck virgins.
It made Oliveri sick. It always came down to cock, cunt or cash, didn’t it? There was never any higher purpose. Pussy was what made the King kick the Pope out of England. Money is why wars were fought between the French, English, and Spanish, for four hundred fucking years. Cock into pussy, Cash into safes. Life into death. It was rotten, top to bottom. Even the beautiful were getting uglier through the years. Down the singing centuries, beauty doesn’t last. Some books last. Battles. Kings. It’s the assholes who win. This is a world gone wrong.
If other people hadn’t been in the bar that night, they probably would’ve suspected Oliveri of being DEA or FBI himself. How else would he have such intimate knowledge of the raid? Well, because the DEA newbie was actually wearing a DEA t-shirt, for one. Secondly, if not for Oliveri’s hurriedly let’s get the fuck out of here now actions, there would be t least thirty-five Americans in jail facing what wuld be effectively life sentences. You give a guy in his thirties a 40 year sentence and his life is over. We all know this. So Oliveri sold his last bale (and a bale it was, like a haystack of cannabis) for 40% of what it was worth, took his $400 000, and signed up for the army to look like a good boy.
Like he said, money is freedom. In the ten weeks he had before reporting a Camp Rilea, he bought a motorcycle and drove it as fast as he could, half hoping he’d fall off before they took him in for his two fucking years. Serving his country. Bullshit. Try diverting suspicion.
“FAIR ENOUGH,” Captain Collard bellowed. “ON YOUR FEET PRIVATE.”
Smith stood at attention so fast shit ran down his pant legs and pooled at his feet. The surviving soldiers laughed. One of them even took a Polaroid, which the Captain, still chuckling, forced him to destroy. You can’t take photos that reflect badly on the United States Army.
Oliveri was shocked he’d actually convinced a superior not to kill. Maybe he would have given Zizek a coin. Captain Collard had actually listened to him and believed him. A few days later Oliveri saw Collard Googling “widowmaker.” The Captain had even bought a book on Amazon called The Golden Spruce by John Valliant.
The Golden Spruce wasn’t about widowmakers, but it was filled with all kinds of tree-related deaths. One man stumbled backwards in such a way that the sharp stump of a thin tree drove itself into his anus, through his intestinal wall, and out his stomach. That man lived another twelve years with the nickname “popsicle.”
Oliveri had read the book but told his Captain he had not because it was best to not to sound too smart around your superior. There were still mini-Stalins all over the world. You had to perfect the “oh really?” face around your boss. An expression that not only suggested you never would have come to such a realization yourself, but that you were lucky to have a boss who so frequently had and shared such shimmering insights with his men.
Riding back to base that night under a lilac sky, shaking off Private Smith’s far-too-profuse thanks, Oliveri began to wonder if he’d made a mistake. Maybe he should’ve let the kid die.
“That was brill, bro!” Smith exclaimed.
(Oliveri guessed that “brill” meant brilliant. He couldn’t be friends with a man who saved syllables like they were Canadian pennies, which went out of circulation.)
“Please don’t say ’brill’ to me, ever again.”
“I’m just saying thank you.”
Oliveri slammed on the brakes and stopped just short of slapping Smith in the face.
“It was a sniper, motherfucker! He killed twelve of us! Men you had breakfast with this morning. Be ready next time. Okay? It might look like a bunch of trees but there are men in those trees trained to shoot distances of over 2500 metres. So stay awakje next time, okay? Your life depends on it. And the lives of others.
Smith was shocked. Oliveri guessed the kid thought they were supposed to be buddies now that he’d prevented his execution.
“I’m sorry bro, it’s just that…”
Tune him out…tune him out…change the station….
There is a fear in me, Oliver thought. His mantra.
The fear of tyranny.
Private Smith blew himself up a week later after stepping on an IED. They mailed the only part of him they could find home. His left ear. He never used his damn ears, but what the hell. You sent home whatever you could. Regulations. Michael Oliveri was tasked with writing to his mother informing her that her son had died.
May 12, 2005
Dear Mrs. Smith,
The United States Army and myself, Sergeant Michael Oliveri, deeply regret to inform you that your son stepped on a landmine three days ago and was killed instantly. Your son died a hero, Mrs. Smith. Enclosed with his bodily remains is the Medal of Honor.
I have served personally with Private Smith and can honestly say that his commendable performance that day was in keeping with the finest traditions of the military service and reflects the highest credit upon himself and the United States Army. The Medal of Honor is the highest award the United States Army can comfer, and Private Smith earned every ounce of its brass alloy.
Sincerely,
Sergeant Michael Oliveri
May 15, 2005
Dear Mrs. Smith,
I’m sorry. I lied to you in my last letter.. Your son died because he failed to follow simple instructions. The day you land in Iraq or Afghanistan you are told “DO NOT PICK UP SODA CANS.” The reason for this because they almost ALWAYS contain improvised explosive devices.”
Time was you’d have to kill 45 Japanese soldiers (minimum!) whilst crawling on the two bloody stumps that used to be your legs, aim a grenade launcher at an enemy bunker and set fire to it, shooting at least 10 men as they tried to escape the burning bunker and letting the rest burn. You had to save bullets back then. You would then be expected to participate in a futher action. A hatrick was usually required for an MOH in WWII days.4 pick up an anti-aircraft gun and shoot down a kamikaze plane to even be considered for the MOH. The United States army hands out the Medal of on Honor like the popcorn man these days.
Now you just have to be an idiot who died. I’m sorry Mrs. Smith. You son was a lovely kid but he was not meant for combat. He would’ve died before the of age ten in the Middle Ages. And had he not joined the United States Army he would’ve worked at McDonald’s until age sixty in our current era of Minimum Wages.
The above letter got my thirty days in the brig (that’s solitary confinement) and an honorable discharge.
“I don’t know what came over you,” my military judge chided. “You could’ve made general by age 40.”
“I have – pardon me, had – no intention of making general sir.”
“And why’s that, Sgt Oliveri?”
“I’ve concluded that war doesn’t work, your honor. War just begets more war.”
“Then shouldn’t you stay in the army? To fight in the wars to come?”
“It’s not in me, sir. I fought my war. I have 230 confirmed kills. That’s 90 more than the guy they made the movie about.”
“American Sniper.”
“That’s the one, sir. He’s credited with the longest shot in history5 but he somehow got himself shot at close range at a gun range? No more war. No more guns.”
At this point in the trial, an admittedly heavily medicated and sedated Michael Oliveri broke out into song:
I don’t want a pickle
I just want to ride on my motorcycle
And I don’t want a tickle
‘Cause I'd rather ride on my motorcycle
And I don't want to die
“Arlo Guthrie?” the judge inquired, eyebrows raised almost higher than his hairline. People love it when you’ve heard a band or artist or song that nobody they’ve ever met before seems to know. The judge was smiling, his face pink with delight. “How’s a young ragamuffin like you know a song like that?”
“Objection, your honour,” Oliveri’s lawyer said, good-naturedly. He knew things were going his defendant’s, and therefore his, way now. “My ragamuffin is 37 years old. He’s surely a more mature form of pastry at his age.”
This hit the right note too.
“Right…the internet!” The judge slapped his forehead. “I forgot. He probably found the song on the internet.”
“He did sir. On the way over to the courthouse we listened to an album by Dan Penn.”
“Dan Penn?”
“Yes, your honor.”
“Haven’t heard that name in decades. What album?”
“Nobody’s Fool.”
“That’s the one with ‘Tearjoint’ on it, correct?”
“Correct, your honour.”
The prosecutor, out of patience, stood up but Michael interrupted him.
“I’m not much for metaphors, you honor. But for me, the pickle in the Arlo Guthrie song is a metaphorical gun. I don’t want a gun. I just want to ride my motorcycle.”
“And you don’t want to die?” the judge added. “It says here you were placed on suicide watch after the death of Private Smith.”
“Just for a week, your honor. I had difficult dealing with the death of a soldier I’d grown so close with, especially given how young he was.”
“How young was that?”
“22?”
“But you are no longer suicidal, Sergeant Oliveri?
“That’s right,” lied Oliveri.
The judge rapped his gavel. “The defendant is free to go. Thank you, young man, for serving you country. Enjoy your motorcycle trip. Please obey all speed and traffic laws.”
“Yes sir. Thank you, sir.”
“NEXT!” the judge bellowed. A man in chains was brought in. Oliveri recognized him from the papers. He was the guy who’d stuck a stick of dynamite up an unconscious Iraqi man’s ass, blew him to bits, and recorded the whole thing on camera, giggling.
How’s that different from Stalin?
The man in chains winked at Oliveri.
“I’m not much for metaphors, you honor. But for me, the pickle in the Arlo Guthrie song is a metaphorical gun. I don’t want a gun. I just want to ride my motorcycle.”
“And you don’t want to die?” the judge added. “It says here you were placed on suicide watch after the death of Private Smith.”
“Just for a week, your honor. I had difficult dealing with the death of a soldier I’d grown so close with, especially given how young he was.”
“How young was that?”
“22?”
“But you are no longer suicidal, Sergeant Oliveri?
“That’s right,” lied Oliveri.
The judge rapped his gavel. “The defendant is free to go. Thank you, young man, for serving you country. Enjoy your motorcycle trip. Please obey all speed and traffic laws.”
“Yes sir. Thank you, sir.”
“NEXT!” the judge bellowed. A man in chains was brought in. Oliveri recognized him from the papers. He was the guy who’d stuck a stick of dynamite up an unconscious Iraqi man’s ass, blew him to bits, and recorded the whole thing on camera, giggling.
How’s that different from Stalin?
The man in chains winked at Oliveri.
Oliveri went straight home, ignoring reporters microphones, tore off hus court clothes, took a shower, and hit the endless American highway. He drove west first, toward California, to see the Pacific Ocean. Under the overpass. Over the underpass. Driving into the redness of the west as the smell of the ocean hit him. He could taste the salt.
IX “Can I Still Call You Koba?”
The Motherland Calls, an 85-metre (279 ft) figure of a woman stepping forward with a raised sword, an allegorical image of Soviet Union, which called on 20 millions of its sons and daughters to throw themselves into the meat grinder of modern 20th Century warfare.
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London. A 110-page tale set in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1893. Until publication, many assumed that it was wildly successful endeavour for all involved, including even Donald Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, who in essence mined the miners; charging them for room, board, whores, annd even dry cleaninh - hickniw
But reality, that pesky word, concept, thing, or non-thing, infringes again. According to Wikipedia, Of the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 people who reached Dawson City during the gold rush, only around 15,000 to 20,000 finally became prospectors. Of these, no more than 4,000 struck gold and only a few hundred became rich.
There are degrees to death proportionality to putrefaction some deaths are done for public display and duty like the mortician who revealed dead Lenin that day but he’d begged off the responsibility.
Too bad about Trotsky. Before he died, when the Party still held some power, Lenin added a PS to an address he knew Stalin would be absent for, for campaigning in Soviet Russia was just an important as campaigning to be Governor of Arizona, or Premier of Manitoba.
It’s agreed that Trotsky would’ve been less brutal than the dictator who took office. He left Lenin 15 mins a day to work, which is barely enough time to begin an introduction, much less reach the point or crux of the letter. And how could Lenin, the most powerful man in the Soviet Union, who nevertheless believed in the Part, dictate a letter to Stalin, the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union, stating:
Stalin is too coarse and brutal this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General.
I like the human reason Lenin had for not wanting Stalin in control. Lenin thought that Stalin was simply too fucking rude. He stood over Lenin’s shoulder as the man worked his measly 15 minutes a day.
Signing coroner reports as dawn rose over the Kremlin.
Signing death warrant of already drowned men, but NOT signing warrant to kill men who’d helped fight the Revolution.
“This…this I cannot do,” said Lenin.
“But you must. He is an enemy of the people.”
“He is not.”
“You will do this.”
“I won’t.”
“Well comrade, I’m not afraid to tell you know that whoever you spare in these final weeks of yours…”’
“Weeks? Doctor Gagarin said I had five months, easily.”
“I signed Doctor Gagarin’s death warrant last night as you snored on that sofa five feet away.”
“…”
“You’re tired. It’s time for bed, comrade.”
“Was ir ever about revolution, comrade? Or was it only ever about you amassing power? About stomping skulls beneath your boots?”
“One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”
“All deaths are tragic, comrade.”
”Is this why you won’t sign the warrant?”
“I’m dead either way. So fuck you.”
“Ty che, blyad?” (Translation: “What the fuck?”)
Lenin held the letter opener out of sight of Stalin, this phantom Superman. This failed priest. This man who presented plans with a cheerful smile to deliberately starve millions of Ukranians. Stalin thought in terms of Five Year Plans. The deliberate starvation was to be the opening round of his second Five Year Plan.
Lenin had just learned he had to think in terms of Five Week Plans, for he had just five more to live. It was December 15, 1923. His death date rapidly approached. January 21 1924. Stalin did not intend to implement organized genocide until 1931-32, when he’d have no shortage of suspects, Trotskyites. Enemies from within. The Kulaks.
The Holomodor. It had a sick, deathly power to the word. Just like the Holocaust.
Men dying in the street by the thousands, then the millions. Like that upstart smartass American writer wrote in The Sun Also Rises.
“How did you go bankrupt?”
“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
3.9 million Unkranians died.
First gradually, then suddenly.
You can’t stop what’s coming, Stalin’s friendly eyebrows seem to say. Staying with Lenin till the end, like a friend. Nope. Like a jailer. A warden. A manipulator. An evil man.
Take a look at that photograph. Really look at it. Stalin looks self-satisfied and cheerful. Trying to look modest but knowing he would soon rule a country of 149,900,000 people. Lenin, on the other hand, looks like he knows damn well he is posing with a monster. Get me away from this vulgar cretin, his squinting, pleading eyes seems to suggest.
Stalin already knew at this point that he would kill millions. Lenin knew it too, he just hoped, from his sick bed, that he might do something about it.
“Idi syuda,” Lenin whispered to Stalin, grasping the handle of the letter opener.
(Translation: “Come here.”)
Oh, but Iosef Stalin was not sentimental. He was suspicious. It’s why he lived so damn long. Instead of moving closer to Lenin’s side, he moved to the opposite end of the desk and learned across it, facing his leader without giving him a chance to stab him. Hell, chances are, Stalin knew exactly what Lenin was trying to do. He’d handed him the fucking opener thirteen minutes previously.
“Schas po ebalu poluchish, suka, blyad!”
(I’ll fucking kill you, you bitch motherfucker!)
Stalin giggled. “It is too late. I won’t kill you even though I could do it in one minute with a bad and a roll of tape. But you are Lenin, and the people already know you formed the Soviet Union. But I will airbrush myself into every moment of history you ever arrived at. I will be at your side for as long as your memory exists. And I will be stuffed and chemically stabilized and put at your side in the tomb where you will lay forever as the man who overthrew Tsar Nicolas II. Except I’ll be the be who gave the order. I’ll make sure the textbiook writers knows that. I’ll be the one who nurses you to health. And I will win whatever war awaits us with the imperialists and my name will last as long as the coattails of Gogol’s overcoat. I am with you, Lenin. I don’t care if you don’t like me. I care only about power. You led our Soviet Union for a mere twenty-four months. I’m not a betting man but I can see where I will take this place. I will rule the Soviet Union well into the 1950s.”
Lenin’s face had drawn into a death mask. For the only thing worse than a protracted and painful death in to watch the Russian rains erode the deeds of his life.
“Rememeber Trotsky’s dustbin speech?”
Lenin nodded.
Stalin had declared the equivalent of a fatwa on Trotsky. Only the person who puts on the fatwa can take it off. And Stalin had never done so. On 20 August 1940, an ostensible student of Trotsky’s named Ramon Mercader was alone with Trotsky in his study in Mexico City under the pretext of showing the older man a document. Mercader struck Trotsky from behind and mortally wounded him on the head with an ice axe. For this he was given a parade and the Order of Stalin.
Ramón Mercader (far right), August 1940
The Order of Stalin was just as frivolous as the American Medal of Honor. In the 1950s, an actor named Mikheil Gelovani was awarded the Order of Stalin, solely for playing Stalin in movies and looking properly majestic. See if you can guess which of the following four photos ae Stalin, and which one is Mikheil Gelovani.
Mikheil Gelovani is #3.
Joseph Stalin6 took control of the Soviet Union on January 25, 1924 and held onto it through WWII all the way until March 5, 1953 (though most historians agree he died on the final night of February 1953 and suffered the death throes of a serious stroke for five days before finally joining the community of the dead, if indeed an organization that never meets can be called a community.)
It’s closer to a list, isn’t it? Stalin would prefer that. He spent his life reading lists, checking names, killing people with a swift checkmark, saving them with a cross-out. A long list of names. A torrent of words. Rivers of the dead.
Stalin did many many MANY evil things, but I think this is the worst he ever did: In 1901 he joined the Marxist Russian Social Democatic Labour Party. He was 23 years old, socially awkward, and shy due to the facial pockmarks a childhood illness had left him with.
A man two years his senior named Alexander Chernov7 took the young Stalin under his wing, both professionaly and personally and within a year both were co-editing Pravda, the party’s newspaper, and committing upwards of five bank robberies a year to fund their revolutionary activities.
Sometime in the year 1905, the young Iosef took the nickname Koba. He’d been arrested for casing a bank, not arresting it, but it was enough for the 34-year old to decide to be more careful. It was much more difficult in a pre-computer age for police to match you to past crimes if you legally changed your name after each arrest. Koba and Alexander were as tight as ever after the arrest, they used to joke that the latter’s nickname should be “Alexander the Average” but a routine bank robbery in the small city of Tiflis (present-day Tblisi) of 1907 went wrong somehow. They walked out of the bank and into a hail of gunfire. Both Alkexander and Koba survived but were sentenced to hard labour in Siberia for tenm years each.
They got out within a few weeks of each other. Koba, who has changed his name to Stalin in 1912, wanted immediately to continue revolutionary activity, while Alexander “the Average” Chernov respectfully bowed out. Just as he had his whole life, Stalin lucked into an administrative role at the Siberian jail while his comrade John worked backbreaking labour for eighteen hours a day in minus thirty-five degree Celsius weather.
Any normal human would understand why Alexander “the Average” Chernov would not want to return to such conditions (he also had a family) but not Stalin. Stalin saw only a traitor.
The first death warrant he signed when became to power on January 25, 1924 was for his old comrade in arms, Alexander Chernov, a man who had fought beside him for years in the earliest days of the Russian Revolution.
After his 1925 arrest, Chernov still thought he could straighten things out. He had no idea the monster his friend had become, or perhaps always was. When his first letter received no reply, Chernov wrote Stalin a letter begging for mercy. The letter began “can I still call you Koba?” The man had known Stalin back when he was called Koba, the name he picked as a young revolutionary in the early 1900s. Hell, most historians agree that is was Alexander Chernov who picked the name Koba for Stalin.
See, every once in a while, if there was enough vodka in Stalin’s office, he would cross a name off instead of making a checkmark and let a man and his family live.
But not Alexander the Average. Not Alexander Chernov. Not the man who had fought with him to overthrow a regime and shock the entire world by forming the Soviet Union, a Socialist state which lasted from 1922 to 1991. Longer than anyone had ever dreamed.
Alexander the Average, who’d on more than one occasion given Koba the last cigarette in his pack, who’d torn his own shirt of as a tourniquet when Koba took a .22 calibre bullet in the thigh during a 1909 bank robbery in Rostov. Alexander Chernov, who had saved Stalin’s life in 1908 couldn’t convince Stalin to spare his life or even the life of his family in the 1925.
As far as Michael Oliveri was concerned, signing Alexander “the Average” Chernov’s death warrant was the most evil thing Stalin ever did.
“Can I still call you Koba?”
The lack of an answer was an answer.
Alexander “the Average” Chernov’s fought for the Victory of the Red Army, not for the red explosion of his brains hitting the execution wall.
See, because Alexander Chernov could have told somebody, somewhere, some long time ago,that Stalin was not present for the execution of Tsar Nicolas II and his family. He was thousands of kilometres away, recruiting soldiers for the Red Army near Lake Baikal.
This man welcome Stalin into the Party he would eventually lead. His name was Alexander “the Average” Gudalov.
This man waited over 30 years for a promotion. Something better than inspecting hay bales and shooting Kulaks. He did not need to become someone important in the Kremlin. He just wanted a piece of the pie he’d risked his life for.
And he did so knowing that proximity to Stalin often resulted in death. A knock on the door late at night, an injection of sodium pentothal, and a bullet in the back of the head by dawn.
Knowing this, he waited for his shot at some kind of adminstrative role. The faithful percentage in him had always known his shot would come. But deep down, he knew t Stalin shot his own. For reasons unfounded. For reasons fabricated. For no reason at all.
Then one day his shot came. The man who frequently gave Koba his very last cigarette was killed with the same casual cruelty it is said Stalin flicked his finished cigarettes at his wife the very night she killed herself, on November 9 1932. Smoke after smoke, flicked at her face. In her eyes, her cheeks, her hair. She would not confess to whatever bullshit he thought of. She killed herself. She would not allow him to decided the terms and time of her death. Oliveri respects and admires that.
If this pre-dated what historians call “High Stalinism,” maybe it’s a good thing Alexander “The Average” was brought to and shot at the wall.
The Soviets didn’t have comic books. Stalin did not know he’d taken his name from the most famous American superhero. I’m sure some samizdat Superman copies circulated the Soviet Union. I’m sure many knew just how stupid he was. He did not know how unoriginal, and even laughable, the Man of Steel was. It’s almost like if the leader of North Korea claimed himself eternal President and gave himself the name Elmer Fudd.
You just can’t take a tyrant like that seriously. Until you have to. What they are missing is the ability sympathize and the ability the be original thinkers. Stalin copied Lenin. Mao copied Stalin. Recently, Parkersburg High School Principal Kenny DeMoss was caught for rampant plagiarism. And it is no secret that Iosef Biden has been caught plagiarzing entire passages his whole career. Hero of the left, Chris Hedges, has been plagiarizing his whole career.
See, because Alexander Chernov could have told somebody, somewhere, some long time ago, that Stalin was not present for the execution of Tsar Nicolas II and his family. He was thousands of kilometres away, recruiting soldiers for the Red Army near Lake Baikal.
Alexander Chernov could also have told someone (what if a journalist!) that not only had Leon Trotsky been airbrushed entirely out in this photo depicting Lenin disembarking the train on the second-anniversary celebration of the Russian Revolution on November 7, 1919, that’s supposed to be Joseph Stalin standing right behind Lenin.
Modest as ever, Stalin left his hat on. That’s because it wasn’t not Stalin at all. It was a stand-in. Stalin was in Petrograd on some vague military assignment. He sure as hell wasn’t in Red Square, and Alexander Chernov knew that. And Stalin knew that Alexander Chernov knew that he knew that. Which is why he wrote no more pleading “Can I call you Koba?” letters. He was not going to beg.
See, Alexander Chernov did not maneuver politically, He didn’t “call in favours.” He waited for his due because he’d fought bravely and strongly and against impossible odds, like all good Russian soldiers before him. You cannot be brave if you are not scared.
He executed Kulaks and traitors and corrupt NKVD officers when he was told to, always wincing when he pulled the trigger because he’d had read the evidence against them and it was always as flimsy as a papier-mâché motorcycle.
Anyway, Alexander Chernov waited over 30 years for a promotion. Something better than inspecting hay bales and executing the Kulaks East of the Urals. He did not need to become someone important in the Kremlin. He just wanted a peice of the pie he’d risked his life for.
All he wanted was a job as cushy and comfy as the one he was becoming increasingly convinced Stalin performed a sexual favour to get back in Siberia. The world doesn’t just hand you easy jobs.
The world doesn’t being one living thing into it that it doesn’t eventually destroy.
Alexander Chernov stayed in Moscow suburbs knowing that proximity to Stalin often resulted in death. A knock on the door late at night, an injection of sodium pentothal, and a bullet in the back of the head by dawn.
Knowing this, he waited for his shot at some kind of administrative role. The faithful part in him had always known his shot would come. But deep down, he knew Stalin shot his own people. For reasons unfounded. For reasons fabricated. For no reason at all.
Then one day his shot came. Alexander Chernov died on his feet, like a Soviet man.
The man who gave Koba his very last cigarette was killed with the same casual cruelty it is said Stalin flicked finished cigarettes at his wife the night she killed herself. Smoke after smoke, flicked at her face. In her eyes, her cheeks, her hair. She would not confess to whatever bullshit he thought of. She killed herself. She would not allow him to decided the terms and time of her death. Michael Oliveri respected and admired this.
So when it got to the point where it wasn’t fun anymore to circle America looking for…well, it didn’t matter.
I know she is beautiful forever.
And anyway he’d always wanted to die in Arizona. The final issue he received before his death made him chuckle: THE 2015 PHOTO ISSUE! It proudly screamed on the cover. Well, okay? Except all issues were all photo issues. Arizona Highways had been in print continuously since 1921. Did people think the first few issues were just verbal descriptions of highways with the odd black and white grainy photo?
The Two Hour Trips Column by John Wheeler
Steep left at the Hot Springs. Watch your speed on the hill. Way too many pebbles. Write to your local representative and see if we can’t do something about that…
Oh, scintillating stuff. I subscribe to a magazine called Arizona Highways because I like the look of Arizona fucking highways.
Sometimes you’d get to see Arizona waterfalls. That’s cool too. A river is just a road for a fish, right? Or sometimes you get these mysterious backroads. Secret avenues. Paper streets.
Now, if the first issue was published in 1921. Pretty soon they’d run out of highways, wouldn’t you think? You would. But there’s always a new way to see the world. Photography tricks like placing sunglasses in front of the lens. Wide angle lens. Time lapse photography like the kind that made that Band of Horses album Infinite Arms.
X Infinite Arms
Michael Oliveri died in a single vehicle motorcycle accident on the I-10 in Arizona on June 4 2015. The coroner guessed he was going 135 miles per hour. Somehow, he’d defeated the governor on his engine. He’d died going every bit as fast as he wanted. Then he took his hands of the bars…
And only toward the end as he flew through the air did Michael Oliveri realize he’d been had.
He’d been invited on a Canadian holiday.
He’d been killed slowly over the course of his life.
He’d never lived.
He’d always been dying.
He was so roadburned he was identifiable only by the sprawling tattoo across his chest, the one he’d gotten the day of his father’s funeral. And the one he’d gotten years later after the Private Smith incident, he felt he was doing his deeper duty. The deeper order from God to intervene in the affairs of men and Convince Captain Collard (more out fascination with these widowmaker trees than affection or even tolerance for Smith, who managed to stay alive for a whole other 8 days before stepping on an IED hidden inside a crush Sprite can).
THIS IS THE FEAR IN ME…
THE FEAR OF TYRANNY.
There was another tattoo on his forearm, but the coroner and Michael’s remaining family members couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. It looked like Russian writing but his family said he never had any Russian friends or even showed an ability to read Russian. It is not unusual for a bereaved family to be perplexed by a child’s tattoos, however, particularly a child they haven’t seen in a long time.
This was the sprawling tattoo across Oliveri’s back:
АЛЕКСАНДР СРЕДНИЙ
ALEXANDER “THE AVERAGE” CHERNOV
A MAN OF HONOR IN A WORLD OF TYRNANNY.
A HRO IS A WORLDOF HELL.
1876-1925
XI JOURNAL CONTENTS OF MICHAEL OLIVERI
Journal Page #1
June 1 2015
Doesn’t this curved Arizona Highway remind you of that famous spot of the Yellow River in China?
It does, doesn’t it?
Page #2
June 3 2015
Let it go
A hard rain is falling
Let it go you dumb fuck
And it’s snowing bad luck
Page #3
June 4 2015
Hey, remember that old joke?
“Someday I’m gonna marry that girl.”
- Utah to Arizona
For years I pretended that jokes applied to me and _______. I gave myself Utah because I hate Nevada – gambling involves no talent and if bad luck didn’t exist I’d have no luck at all - because I invented my own personal religion, like the Morons did. Mormons, sorry. Typo.
I looked all over for her. How dod you find someone in 2015 when you don’t have their phone number of address? Didn’t they stop doing those milk carton Have You Seen Me? ads years ago because too many of the kids were ending up dead and the Dairy Farmer of America feared it would create an association they call a “conditioned reflex.” This was as popular a method as deprogramming back in the 70s, which is to say, it did not fucking work at all. Let’s see you were addicted to smoking. The doctors would ask you what food you hated most and you’d say broccoli. So each time you smoked a cigarette, you had to eat a few forkfuls of broccoli, the theory being that in time you would come to hate smoking as much as you hated broccoli.
Instead of a bunch of health former smokers, sales of broccoli exploded across the United States. It worked backwards. People came to love broccoli as much as they loved their hourly Pall Mall. A classic 70s fuck up.
But who am I to say what is insane behavior? I searched all across America for a person I met once at McDonald’s in El Paso. So I checked El Paso first. No dice. Then Sante Fe. Nope. Phoenix. Nuh uh. Albuquerue. Sorry, pal, nobody by that name works here.
I even swerved north-by-northeast to check out Colorado, where I outran a tornado during an electric storm. I was listening on my headphone to a Swedish surf rock band comprised of one guy who sings in an American accent. At the height of the storm, being pelted by hailstones the size of testicles, the sky a brilliant and unEarthly pink, that whirling cone of soil and debris wending its way through the dark, it felt for a few sublime minutes that I was on another planet. It was a great night; one of the great nights of my life, actually.
After beating that tornado I was aimless. I drove all night through Butte to get to an eye-poppinly expensive motel on the outskirts of Seattle. $140 a night. For a stained sheet, what looked like recently dried blood on the bathroom floor, and that distinct cat-piss stench of cocaine.
I checked the high desert of California. I checked the low desert of California, and deliberately acted like a dick - fake Bawston accent and everything, just so I could play my favoutite Brant Bjork song, but no one took the bait. I just wanted to slick my hair like Josh Homme (I think Homme and Bjork despise each other now, but I don’t care about rock star rivalries. I’m looking for something that matters.) You could call the lyrics turgid doggerel, and you’d be right. But they way he sings that “so what the fuck man?” line pushes the stanza firmly and fairly into the category of Classic American cool. Bjork plays the same riff for five minutes without changing a damn thing. That takes some Malcolm Young level discipline.
I get up when the sun goes down
And I shine 'em up and I hit the town
Well I trim it clean and I roll it up
And then I take it nice and slow...so what the fuck man?
I'm gonna let the stars show me the way
I'm gonna drop in on your palace...and I'm gonna be your slave
Cuz I live it up in Bermuda Dunes
And I stain the sand of this land with all the blood that I lose…
It should go without saying that I scoured the middle desert. I even tried the low desert a second time, but by then I’d been listening to the same riff for two hours and it was getting as stale as a school bus with the windows closed all summer long.
All I found in Reno were people trying to sell me blowjobs (cheap, they said, boasting that I could have quality or quantity, byt both would cost me $50. I didn’t wanna hurt anybody’s feelings so I said I was Canadian. Which I am. But also that I only carried Canadian currency with me).
One woman gave my the side-eye. “You know you can just say no. Nobody gets this far into America without American money, honey.”
A few minutes later the same woman caught up with me as I was walking the Riverwalk District hoping to see a river. Didn’t even catch a creek. She asked if I waned to buy a bottle of cologne. “Brand new $120. Cap still closed. Just stolen from Bath & Body Works a few hours ago.”
I didn’t want anything she had to sell. It was the perseverance I admired. So I gave what little money at her ($40 or $50 bucks) on the condition she go away. But She insisted I take the bottle. “You smell like gasoline.” It was Swiss Army. She stood there, hands on hips, waiting. Sighing, I popped the cap and sprayed a few meek splashed. She laughed, a snorting kind of seen-it-all kind of laugh.
“Gimme that,” she said, and proceeded to soak me in that goddamn shit. She pulled my t-shirt toward her and sprayed some down my chest. She yanked my pants forward and sprayed some down there too. None of this was necessary. I’d been showering every morning in every motel. Then she said, with my pants still held forward, “I am going to check this out” and reached down and gave my cock a squeeze. “Not bad,” she said, like she’d seen every single dick in the world. “Wasn’t expecting that.”
“Expecting what?”
“Girth.”
I wasn’t about the argue that I’d been told (by exactly two women and by the internet) that my length was above average by a good half inch. I simply got the fuck out of there, Swiss Army bottle in hand. When I looked back she was sashaying back toward whatever motel or crash house she came from. Usually I was more streetwise than to get taken for $50 from a sex worker for a product I was never going to use. But she’d identified my weakness, my self-consciousness about my looks, and she’d stuck her hooks in. She’d made it seem like she sincerely wished to beautify me. Help me get a date.
I told you I was a fucking idiot, didn’t I? That I used to think the Fibonacci sequence was the name of dolphin language?
This is not my version of a hooker-with-a-hear-of-gold story. She was just weird. After wards I smelled like a Wall Street motherfucker for a week. No weak motel shower could take the coat of varnish she’d soaked me with. I’d been had.
I have some good news though. Last night I popped the governor off my engine like a beercap off a bottle.
Tomorrow I get to (finally!) drive as fast as I fucking want.
“Ireland’s earliest hermetic monks found solitude from the 6th Century. While most of Europe was reeling in the post-Roman disarray of the Dark Ages, the land of saints and scholars (as Ireland widely became known) bucked the trend by entering a remarkable golden age of scholasticism and artistic achievement, characterised by monastic settlements like Derrynaflan.” BBC Travel. “Ireland’s Priceless Treasures Hidden by Monks.” Tracey Croke. August 1 2022.
“Sometimes I lives in the country. Sometimes I lives in the town. Sometimes I haves a great notion. To jump into the river an' drown.” – Lead Belly
Hell Awaits is the second studio album by thrash metal band Slayer. It was released in 1985. any prefer 1986’s Reign in Blood and I count myself among that brood. It features what many consider their signature song, “Raining Blood.” My fav Slayer song is actually”Screaming From the Sky” from 1998’s Dibolus in Musica. Tom Araya is definitely doing something here tht can be called singing:
A hat-trick is a hockey term for a single player scoring 3 goals in 1 game. The phrase may be used in soccer, but I cannot and do not watch soccer. Low scoring, low event games are, in my American opinion, the epitome of boredom.
In May 2017 a Canadian sniper would record the longest sniper kill ever at a range of 3,540 m (3,871 yards). The weapon used was an McMillan Tac-50. The conflict was the Iraqi Civil War.
Ио́сиф Виссарио́нович Ста́лин
Иосиф Стали