CEREAL AFTER SEX

Have you heard of a line?

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I don’t know what it is, but every time I go out in the world lately my patience with human beings is further tested and frazzled. It seems like decency, kindness, and just plain ol’ consideration for others has completely gone out of style. Rudeness and selfishness seem to be trending upward. To hate on others is the honorable thing to do these days, so it seems to me. It sickens and saddens me. I’m trying to find the light through the fog, but it’s really hard to see at times. Maybe I’m not looking in the right place??

The unfortunate inspiration for this post is the two recent trips I made to the infamous pharmacy in our town, the one that starts with a red W and rhymes with… Ruptured spleens. The pharmacy counter is always understaffed and there’s usually a line of customers all the way back to the pissers near the shampoo aisle on the other side of the store. It’s an agonizing experience, and one must be prepared to sacrifice a significant amount of time in their day just to pick up a few prescriptions.

On my first outing, I was waiting in line and was moving closer to the front every 17 minutes or so. When I was in about the second spot in the queue, a woman with two little kids – she was the grandma because one of the little girls, maybe about 5, was crying and pouting because grandma wouldn’t let her have something or another and the little girl kept saying “I’m going to tell my mom that you were mean to me.” The grandma just scoffed, said, “Go ahead and tell your momma I’m mean to you,” and then threatened to spank her.

Anyways, the mean grandma stepped in front of everybody and wriggled her big ass straight to the counter to fuss about her appointment for whatever kind of vaccination she was getting. I hope it was a vaccination against being an inconsiderate jackass. I made a what the hell gesture with my hands and turned to look at everyone behind me. All the faces there mirrored my frustration and anger.

Um, hello? There’s a line here, lady. Do you not see it or are you that much of an inconsiderate person, as well as being a mean grandma?

Not 5 minutes later, another woman comes up and goes straight to the counter in complete disregard for the ever-growing line of people that surely must have been visible to her. But she was blind to it, nonetheless. Ugh, I was so mad at that point I wanted to scream and throw diabetic supplies around. (That’s what was on the shelf beside me). And as I did just a minute ago, I wanted to yell out, “There’s a line here lady!” And the fact that the lone clerk at the counter said nothing to these people made it even worse. How about some “You’ll have to go to the back of the line, Karen.”

Why are you catering to these jerks!? I know it’s not the counter clerk’s fault for there not being enough help, I’m sure they’re just as frustrated, too. It’s the damn corporate gods who do everything in their power to get the most for the least. It’s called good business sense or something like that. It’s profit over people is what it is, and there’s nothing good about that.

And in my return trip today, it happened again. I was second in queue, (somehow, I am always second in queue when these things happen), and this woman comes sneaking in from the side. I watch her as she’s eyeing the line, then eyeing the counter. She’s going back and forth, back and forth, like Pong blips, measuring up the odds of whether or not she’ll get bawled out by anyone if she makes her move.

The guy in front of me, who resembled Frankenstein by the way, counter-blocked this woman and stepped forward. She was probably scared of him. I was next up to face the challenge, and when Frankenstein completed his transaction, I looked straight ahead and moved before the woman could sneak in. I could tell in my peripheral vision that she was looking at me with these sad, accusing eyes like that was going to make me just let her cut in. Because somehow, she was in the right. It’s like those idiot drivers who don’t know how to work a 4-way stop and start going out of turn. But despite her wondering scowl, I stayed strong and kept moving forward and when I got to the counter, I felt good for standing up for what was right.

My transaction was quick, and I was off straightaway. I didn’t make any eye contact with the sneaky lady, so I don’t know if she made her move after me. I just made for the store exit, got into my car and drove home.

I don’t know why, but I actually started feeling a little bit bad about not letting the woman cut in front of me. But then I was telling myself, “No. Why should I feel bad?” I’m done with people preying on my weaknesses and taking advantage of me. I’m done with being too soft. It was unfair for her to try and slip in before me and everyone else. I didn’t play the nice guy for once. I stood up for my place in line. I stood up against injustice, just like one of the Super Friends. So, yeah, there’s no reason I should feel bad. None at all. If anything, she should feel bad. But I’m sure she doesn’t because if she were that kind of person, she would have gone to the back of the line in the first place.

But I just don’t understand what gives these people the idea that it is perfectly okay to do this? As the title of this article states: Have you not heard of a line? I just don’t get why some people think they are so much more important than others, why their time is more valuable. How can you be so selfish and oblivious? How can you settle into your bed and soul at night without choking on your own awfulness??

I just don’t get it. I don’t. My brain isn’t wired to be like that. I can’t compute what makes these people comfortable with being crappy. And when I was driving home, I was really overcome with this feeling of not belonging in this world or even wanting to belong in this world. We seem to be drifting toward this communal mindset that is so off base, so twisted around, so humanly wrong. This tragic communal mindset is breeding all these false beliefs to the point that up is down, and right is wrong, and evil is good. I see people worshipping sinners while stepping on saints. Hate is good. Greed is good. Being a racist is good. Stealing is good. Cheating is good. Lying is good. Treason is good, etc… Where’s it going to end?

It’s going to end with the end of us all. That’s where.

By
Aaron Echoes August

For more of my ranting on the human condition, check out the latest episode of my The Laguna Bungle sessions. It’s a fictional story about an emotional private detective that stumbles upon a new case involving an unfaithful husband and more.

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The Laguna Bungle (Session 4)

The Nomadic Mind

I’m not sure if the woman in the pink bathrobe had just hired me to kill her husband, but it sure felt that way. And if that was the case of the case, she was getting it for a bargain. But there was no way in hell I was killing her cheating husband for 1,000 clams. I’m not in the business to kill, and I never have been, and maybe never will be. But I suppose I should let it be known that if I had to kill someone, I would. If it came right down to it? Absolutely. I pack a Walther PPK because it’s a messy world out there and sometimes you have to protect yourself, stand up for yourself no matter what, even if that means plugging a guy, or girl, who are ready and all too willing to plug you. That’s how I feel about it. You can’t just let the world cross the line and have its way with you whenever it wants.

My thoughts drift like the sands of the Sahara. My mind is nomadic, and so here I go and go again.

I always find it strange that people are born into this world completely innocent and then they get folded into it with a prodding paddle of good and evil, and it makes them hard as stone, bad-hearted or sad or full of pain for some reason or another. I don’t get why we allow that, as a society, as so-called human beings. Why do we take this simple, fresh from the womb innocence and brand it with the burning hurt of this planet just to make more hurt. Right now, it seems the whole world is so damn backward that people are digging the pain, they’re digging the hurt, they’re digging the hate. The prayer warriors out there are cheering for demons. The leaders are ripe for gleefully tossing bombs. Their goals are suffering and destruction. I just don’t get it. Sometimes I just want off this watery marble. I want to be like Captain Kirk and transport myself somewhere else, somewhere else I can breathe.

Some people would argue and say that none of us are born innocent. They say we’re all born with sin already in us and the only way to get past that is to take a dip in a baptismal bath at the church, like the one of my youthful days, the one on Erie Avenue in my hometown by the sea in a place called Ohio. Well, it wasn’t really a sea, it was a lake. A big lake. A big, cold lake. But it looked like some magical, mystical far-off sea to me. Like the Caspian or something like that.

That’s where they dipped me in, the holy water font in the church, not in the lake, although that may have been better, more real, a far more shocking electrocution of the nerves, an authentic awakening of the newly born spirit. That house of the universal god blessed my throat and listened to my sins, too. And now I’m no better than most coming out on the other end of that long ago gig. Now I carry a gun and my nerves are shot. I get lonely, too, but then sometimes loneliness tastes good and I revel in it. There’s something about loneliness that drives a man’s creativity as well as wanton self-destruction. All my ex-girlfriends think I’m crazy. That’s why they’re exes. Maybe I am crazy, but you sort of have to be in this world and with what I do. I’m okay with my shader pale of madness as I like to call it. It’s like loneliness that you just can’t hold in anymore.

Church. What a bizarre place. So ornate, so golden, so solemnly colorful as the people look up and worship some invisible being or idea. I always liked the smell of the incense burning away in the swinging thurible, always in perfect rhythm to the indecipherable chant of the white-robed holy one directing the show. That exotic scent of the incense mingled with the worshippers, their perfume and the aftershave and the afterglow of rapid morning sex of sinful lovers in heat. I close my eyes and just listen and breathe it all in.

As I drove north on the 1, the PCH, I looked to my left and saw the ocean spread out like a big ruffled blue blanket. To my right it was clusters of buildings, rectangular plug-ins with windows and porches and verandas and parking lots and yards, all of the works of the inhabitants carved into the orange and green and asphalt gray and ancient white and yellow adobe, everyone gathered for a game of real life right there at the edge of the teetering coast.

Everyone is living on top of each other here. I live on top of others in a place called Huntington Beach. It’s crowded. My apartment is small, but it works. It has big windows at least, but the rent kills. It’s hard to find a place to park. I don’t have a bedroom because it’s a studio, so the rumpled bed is in the main living space. So is the refrigerator because the kitchen is too small. I don’t have a stove, only a two-burner hotplate. I eat out a lot which is fine because there are so many restaurants pressing in on me, just like everything else. It all presses in, there’s no room, it’s jam packed here. Every space flows into the next. There are no borders here.

But I can walk to the beach, and looking out at the endless ocean gives me a sense of release, and relief. I’m on the third floor and I have a small balcony so I can sit outside and drink coffee or read a book and look out upon the hive of madmen. I can listen to all my neighbors screw each other, too. No one is ever quiet about it. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a dirty movie but I’m always the guy on the sidelines just watching and sweating, craning my neck trying to focus in on the penetration and I’m just puzzled as to how they get themselves in such positions. I can also hear the punches crushing faces and the screams and the cops knocking on doors.

Did I mention that the air all around me smells like the ocean and exhaust. It’s weird, but I kind of like it. It first hits you out around Indio when you come in from the east. It smells different than anywhere else I’ve ever been — this carnivorous California. These endless rows of mad life.

The woman in the pink bathrobe who hired me to throw surveillance on her cheating husband has a strange name. Carola Strawberry. That’s what she told me and that’s how I got her saved in my phone now. Carola Strawberry. Before I left her house, I made fun of her name because she made fun of mine — John Smoke. She thought it was made up, so I told her I thought her name was made up. Then she told me her husband’s name and I just about lost it — Garola Strawberry. “Granola?” I asked her.

She repeated it, slower so that I could understand her because she had a strange accent, like something out of South America. I got my money and told her I’d follow up in a couple of days after she emailed me some more info and logistics. I was heading home to get cleaned up before I headed out to the desert for a night or two just to get crazy lonely and moon high and wild like a wanderer. I needed time to think about everything. I needed time to consider my future in this world.

TO BE CARRIED ON

By
Aaron Echoes August
Episodes of the Ephemeral Green Ego

I went to the library to do some research on what it means when one loses one’s marbles. I can imagine my mind as a cluster of marbles – the colors being emerald green, earth blue, cherry red, tiger orange, a hazy gray, a ghost white, a mauve mouth, a yellow memory in stone, aluminum silver, gaseous pink, lonely brown, Sand People taupe, leprechaun rainbow gold – and they were clustered there like I said, in a chalk circle and the shooter was cocked and knocked and rolled like circular glass and the marbles scattered like the thoughts in my own head.

Crack, palooey, brainwaves wobbling, dreams unremembered, love at times cumbersome, love at times more delicious than any life anyone ever had, palooey, the marbles move like a spiral galaxy, arms spitting glass balls, eyes tumble and roll, the pupils all gyroscope and nonsense like buttery grape jelly in a spaceship.

I unhinged my laptop, set up my mouse, plugged in my earbuds so that I could listen to third eye activation music. It helps me think and glow and be bulbous in thought. I started going through websites about marbles and psychiatry because my own psychiatrist told me it would be helpful to do my own research on my own condition. He called it something like getting in touch with my inner self. What the hell does he know about my inner thoughts? Everything, I suppose.

I reached into the pocket of my light navy-blue jacket and retrieved my pack of Russian red Camel cigarettes. I didn’t even think about being in the library and so I just put it in my mouth and lit it and started smoking. It didn’t take long for the young skinny hippie guy at the circulation desk to come over and start yelling at me – but in a quiet way because we were in the library – and he said to me, “Sir, there’s no smoking in the library. You have to take that outside immediately.”

I looked at him and then I looked at my Russian red Camel, the tip glowing and a swirl of grayish white smoke coming off of it like a genie coming out of a bottle. “Oh,” I replied. “I guess I didn’t realize what I was doing. Habit, you know.”

“Yes. A bad habit at that. And I must ask you again to please take it outside.”

“But I just sat down and got my computer all set up… Can you watch my stuff then?”

“I can watch your stuff, but please make it quick.”

I was sitting on an uncomfortable, stodgy couch in the office of my psychiatrist, Dr. Infinity. I always told him I thought his name was made up because he was hiding something from a past life.

“No,” he would tell me. “It’s not made up. It’s my real name.” Then he’d point to all his framed degrees that hung on the wall that had his full name printed on them in black calligraphy: Dennis M. Infinity.

“What’s the M stand for?” I asked him once.

“Mikael,” he answered.

So, Dr. Dennis Mikael Infinity sat across from me with his notepad and sharpened pencil and he wanted to know how I had been.

“I had a really strange dream that has me concerned.”

“Why are you concerned about this particular dream?”

I hesitated to tell him because he had a bad habit of being overly judgmental. “I dreamt about the Jolly Green Giant.”

He shifted uncomfortably in his expensive IKEA chair. “The Jolly Green Giant?”

“You know, the giant green guy who makes vegetables.”

“I don’t think he actually makes the vegetables. I believe he just oversees the process. Nature makes the vegetables. Life makes the vegetables.”

“Okay, Doc. Whatever you say… But in this dream, I was watching him from a short distance, and he was walking among the cornfields and the squash vines and the bean poles and the rows of peas and beets and carrots…”

“I get the picture. You don’t have to mention every vegetable known to man.”

“Well, he stopped walking and was just standing there looking across the land with pride and he had his hands on his green hips and then all of a sudden his underwear fell down.”

“Underwear? I don’t think the Jolly Green Giant wears underwear… It’s a leafy tunic as I recall.”

“Well, in my dream he was wearing underwear.”

“Was it green underwear?”

“Yes. Everything about him is green. Can I finish telling you about my dream now?”

“I’m sorry. Go on.”

“Like I was saying, his underwear just fell down and then he started…”

Dr. Dennis M. Infinity leaned forward with growing interest in my story. “Started what?”

“He started making pee on all the vegetables.”

“Making pee?”

“He was peeing on all the veggies!”

“That’s disgusting,” the doctor said, and he made a notation on his pad with his pencil. “Are you sure he was really peeing?”

“Yes. He was peeing all right. And he wasn’t even holding his big green thingy in his hand. He was just letting it go on its own, and he was laughing about it, like it really made him happy to be peeing on all those vegetables.”

My psychiatrist removed his glasses and pinched at his eyes like I was causing him great distress.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him.

“You’re dream. It’s very strange. I’m not sure what to make of it.”

“It has to mean something.”

“Have you recently had any bad experiences with vegetables?”

I glanced up at the ceiling and thought about it. “No. Nothing comes to mind.”

He looked at his watch and happily sighed. “My, my. We’re already out of time. Thank goodness.”

“But what about my dream?”

“Let me think on it for a while and we can talk about it more next week.”

“All right then. Bye,” I said, and I got up and walked out of his office feeling like the biggest tool in the world.

Dr. Dennis Mikael Infinity sat at a round Formica table in the fancy, clean breakroom at the office where he worked with all the other mental specialists. He pulled a sandwich out of a brown paper bag, unwrapped it from its wax paper and bit into it. He washed it down with some Coke in a red and white can.

One of his colleagues, a bastard named Brett Walker came into the breakroom and joined him at the table. He set down a white foam comtainer and eagerly opened it. Dr. Infinity craned his neck to see what he had to eat. It was Chinese food. Vegetable lo mein. “Looks like I have a better lunch than you,” Dr. Walker teased.

“Vegetables,” Dr. Infinity mumbled.

“What’s that about vegetables?”

“Oh, my last patient was telling me about the most bizarre dream he had. It involved vegetables.”

“Oh really? Was this patient a woman? Did it involve a cucumber?” the other doctor chuckled oddly.

“No, no, no. Why does everything have to be sexual with you?” Dr. Infinity protested.

“What can I say. I’m a very sexual guy. Do you know how many women I’ve slept with in the past week?”

“No. And I’m not sure I want to know.”

“Twelve.”

“Twelve!? Bullshit.”

“It’s true,” Dr. Brett Walker boasted, and he took a big steaming bite of his veggie lo mein, and then suddenly made a face as if he was extremely grossed out.

Dr. Infinity took notice. “What’s wrong?”

These vegetables taste funny. Like nasty funny. Ugh.” Dr. Walker tossed down his white plastic fork and closed the lid of the food container.

“You’re not going to eat it?” Dr. Infinity asked.

“No way. It tastes like…”

“Jolly Green Giant urine?” Dr. Infinity curiously probed.

“What? What the hell are you talking about?”

Dr. Infinity sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Nothing… But would you mind if I took your container of food?”

Dr. Brett Walker looked at him like he was really weird, stood up, and pushed the lo mein in his direction. “Be my guest. But why?”

“Research,” he replied.

“Whatever Infinity. Hope it doesn’t kill you.” Dr. Walker scooted away from the table, stood, walked to the door and went out.

The psychiatrist opened the lid to the lo mein and peered inside. It didn’t look bad, he thought. He sniffed at it. It didn’t smell that bad, maybe a little off. Dr. Infinity looked around the breakroom to make sure he was truly alone. Then he reached in with a hand and scooped up a big sloppy plop of the lo mein and shoved it in his mouth like a starving caveman from the Paleolithic Age. He chewed slowly, swallowed, and then repeated the actions until the entire container was empty and licked clean.

The doctor drained his can of Coke, got up from the table, disposed of his lunch trash, and went back to his office. He sat there at his desk in the dim quiet and looked out his big window at the world. Far off in the distance, beyond the streets and the buildings, past the highways and the dams, nestled up against purple mountains were great farm fields of golden green, and that is where he saw him, the Jolly Green Giant watering the world with revenge for what the unnatural made him.

END

By
Aaron Echoes August
The Chronicles of Anton Chico (Low and High)

Getting Low on the Pecos, Getting High in Colorado

There’s a feeling of strangulation that does not make me choke. I felt it this morning. Every thought boiling in my head was negative. Negative power and my heart raced and my stomach churned and my whole body rattled with an overall feeling of exhaustion and nervousness. I feel sick the second I wake up. Drag my feet across the stained carpet of my apartment. Shuffle slow like a crippled old man with head bowed down and my vision catatonic. Hating every second of it now. Hating to breathe, to stand, to walk, to move, to sleep. Peeling my own skin off. Biting my own lip off. Chewing my nails, dabbing at tearless eyes. Screaming at the slightest mishap. A crumb falls onto the kitchen floor, and I scream! A drawer opens awkwardly, and I scream!

Don’t touch me!

Don’t talk to me!

Don’t look at me!

Don’t you dare take my picture!

I went down to the river. The mighty Pecos River that wasn’t so mighty. Maybe like me. I stood on the edge looking down at the slowly swirling brown water, the color of melted milk chocolate with maybe some blood in it. I saw my black shadow staring back at me. The ripples of the water were burning through me. I could simply fall in, but I wondered if the water would be deep enough to even come up over me. With the drought and incessant sun, all the rivers were drying up and slowly crawling now through the desert. You could see the sandbars sticking up in the middle in some places. I probably could have walked across the Pecos. Walk across like some mad magician or deity from another century. But I was too worried of the things that may live down in the water, in the sand at the bottom. Oozy, stingy things that would surprise and shock me with a pinprick of poison, or worse yet, attach themselves to me like the leeches I saw in the natural pools at Sitting Bull Falls.

Fear. So much fear and uneasiness. Scared of everything now. Scared of walking to the mailbox. Scared of unlocking my car door. Scared of staring at the sun and petrified to go to work. People will look at me when I come through the door. Stare, whisper, laugh at the fool I am. I am not normal you see. I am odd. I am Fran, Bling, Space Monkey. An alien in London. A lightning bug in New Orleans. A spirit in the sky who knows no lies other than his own shattered existence. I am Anton Chico, and I might be a lunatic.

Me, fumbling for a stick of dynamite in some far away dark away alleyway on the wrong side of this universal tide; the blue, explosive eyes running down now, running down now with an ample amount of wet tear grooves forming in the canyons of yonder young face and the tide of tornadoes and the forest lawn so brown, brown from all the pine straw littering the ground like a flagship mattress of comfort laid down for the hobos; for the animals; for me in silent, hurtful prayer; oh, the silent hurtful prayers sent up to God’s mighty throne on a bleeding arrow, I try to pierce Him in the heart with my troubles, my bitches, my complaints, my worries, my fears, my wishes, but I must have stabbed him too deep, too deep in God’s own hurtful heart that he cannot relay a message back to me down here on Earth, he is wounded, but reaching out from his hospital bed, you know they got him on a respirator up there, up there beneath the covers of angels’ dark and sinister eyes. Is there really love in Heaven or be it all a hoax for money?

I was walking through a blizzard in Colorado. Everything around me was white and I could taste the heavy flakes of snow on my tongue. Like stale water, dirty water, coated with the grime of the atmosphere before floating down so softly, so treacherous to the earth. The going was slow. The snow was so deep — at least eight inches now. My feet were soaked, but strangely warm, maybe numb as I trotted on. There’s a brown, dilapidated barn ahead. Some shelter from the wind and the cold for a bit I was hoping. The door had a chain and a lock, rusted, old, not touched for years I thought. I pulled on the door, rattled and shook it but it did not give. I did not want to hurt myself anymore. I reached into my coat pocket and withdrew the marijuana cigarette, put it between my dry-by-winter lips, retrieved my lighter from another pocket, shielded it from the wind… And then there was flame. Flame set to joint. Inhale. Hold it. Exhale. A rush of blood to the head. A rush of hollow, rubbery sensations. Time flowing all nonsense now. I was so alone in the world.

By
Aaron Echoes August
Bite of the Oven Salesman

To Better the Bread

In a previous life I had been an oven salesman in Omaha spending my livid, blank days doling out shiny appliances and extended warranties to unsuspecting innocents who believed all their dreams would come true if they just had a beautiful new stove. But it wasn’t just stoves I sold. I peddled refrigerators, washers and dryers, microwaves, vacuums, dishwashers, and on and on and on. You get the picture. To sum it up in two words: Home Appliances.

And the customers weren’t all unsuspecting innocents, most of them were assholes who thought they knew more about appliances than I did. Fucking electrical conspiracy theorists, because you know, everything is a conspiracy. I did my best to take advantage of those fools and I was rewarded for it by the Prophets of Profit, the ones who ate bloodied birthday cakes in corporate board rooms with fancy tables and cushy chairs and big glass windows that looked out upon the steam and the pain of any American city.

But the masses, anyways. I could lump them all into one big… Lump. It’s ding-a-ling city everyday as I wait for them so elegantly on the highly polished tile floor of Snow White tattoos, her upper lip bruise, winter gown torn all asunder. There I am, taking my cool lean position against a $7,000 stainless-steel refrigerator that talks to you, makes your grocery list, and shows you pictures of your wife screwing the milkman when you’re out at work. You won’t need any milk today, Todd, that base has already been covered, and covered quite well… But you may need a fresh mop for the dirtiness that got spilled on the floor.

Ha. Back to the shopping, bopping zombies. The gullible pea pods consuming and consuming and consuming more. Petty transient beings filling their castles with multi-functional plastics and metals and glass so they can wake up every day, put a pot on the stove to boil some water and feel as if they had finally arrived at Shangri-La… And I brought it all to them. I was the deliverer of kind goods to make their lives simple and fulfilled. That was me. Dressed in crumbly, cheap pants and a sterile polo shirt with my name on a little plastic rectangle pinned to my breastplate; just another retail machine in a huge army of retail machines, the Profit Prayer Warriors, doing the dirty deeds of the corporate cyclopsos who looked down upon us from the mighty throne of the control room in the fortress of fortune knitting together greed and broken souls with pairs of very pointed and bloodied needles.

So yes, I sold ovens and other things in Omaha. That’s in Nebraska. Flat. Corn. Wrapped tightly around the finger of Mr. Mighty Capitalism and taking the bus home every night, breathing out the cold from my lungs I wondered why I was so miserable within the confines of my own existence. Wasn’t it obvious? I sold ovens and other things in Omaha.

I wasted my life on that shit, the precious time allotted to me on Earth, off and on for roughly seven years. In between I worked various odd jobs like cleaning buildings, or washing cars, or shoveling out driveways in the winter. As you can surely understand I grew weary of the lifestyle, and it became obvious to me that I needed a change and needed it quickly before I fell dead like a red wasp smacked with the thorny branch of a rose bush and then stepped on.

One night, in my basement apartment on the evil end of Omaha, I was studying a map of New Mexico. That’s in the United States. And you will probably find it hard to believe, but some people don’t know that. There’s a lot of idiots out there.

New Mexico, USA, the Land of Enchantment. I had been to the state before on mini-vacations and the place always struck me as so out of the norm. Almost un-American, but in a very good way. New Mexico, the land where you can breathe and stretch your wings and get lost for days on end without any sign of human scathings and scratchings. New Mexico. Wide open, blue, red, golden, big. New Mexico. A gaping gap of landscape chiseled by one of God’s angry, yet beautifully creative claws. I can smell the juniper now in the scent memories I have. The pinon, the pine, the dust, the cactus, the brackish water, that gut-wrenching sun like Halloween harvest mallow, the blazing white-hot eye of space god number one beating its flaming lashes down upon the hard, ruddy ground.

The topography of that wild place is so varied. Dips and hollows of ever-changing highs and lows. Hills and valleys. Forests and desolation. One big city and some historical markers, but mostly tiny villages where the ancestors of the land have carved out existences for hundreds of years. Generation to generation. The same land, the same way of life, but always with the threat of the new man encroaching ever further upon their homesteads all too willing to plop down another 20-gas-pump convenience store for the white wealthy zooming through in their hopped-up roadsters. Crawling like ants down from the big cities they come to spill over the beautiful wasteland, to spill out their green dough and suck up all the empty spaces just to fill those empty spaces with things that really do leave a person empty. Those Eartheaters of the Metropolis. Those bastards who carry credit cards in holsters and smile at you with their professionally polished teeth and wave the national urchins away from the side of their freshly waxed roving machines. Blah! No sensibility and no sense of history or genealogy or anthropology. Build more and build it big and the happy white roadsters will come to buy and buy and buy. Sell and smile little clerkie. Smile and sell.

I packed up my life, waved goodbye to the grinding ways of Omaha – and its headstrong appliance culture – and headed West, because like Jim Morrison said: The West is the best.

By
Aaron Echoes August