Diggin’ for Dead Men

Once, while mining for mineral ore deposits somewhere in the subterranean depths of south western Pennsylvania, Benjamin had the desire to posit a daring question to his digging buddy and long time comrade Jake.

All dirty and capped with a yellow protective helmet, it was a provocatively human moment when he turned his head and pronounced…

“Why are all my hero’s dead?”

And sure it was true that in the good old days he watched great characters from MASH keel over from well simulated bullet hits. He continued his investigation into the curious nature of mortality with his obsession for crime dramas and cops shows. It was a combination of his love of logic and the law, yes, with the fertile subtext of a lonely bachelor home life. But they all seemed to pass away too suddenly, much to the heavy burden of our narrator.

“Can we recognize hero’s when they are alive? Or are they better dead, when they are people without problems?”

True that a certain amount of overlooking can make a better role model, as I’m sure that our questioner is insinuating. Even though, I must question the truest motive behind his inquiry, his quest to be enlightened. Didn’t your daddy love you and fill you with respect, led you a childhood without superfluous violence. Didn’t every hero of your comic book genre grant you some lesser amount of helplessness and convey a lesson, a moral, and a commandment. Did not the coaxing of your peers give you the esteem to wander away from ephemeral and angst-ful questions?

Maybe it was not that at all.

Law school was quite the venture. Everybody knew you could do it, everyone lauded your capacity to succeed. You would be an enterprising youth, emerging like a busted chrysalis into the new world of surging opportunities. You drank and fucked, and made me proud. You harvested youth and promoted your own. You were careful enough; you didn’t steal any lives or make any new ones. For this accomplishment we bowed until our foreheads touched our feet.

One day you ran into a girl, perhaps an easy one. She though she had cancer, she cried, she thought nobody loved her enough, she knew you might mean those things about marrying her sad ass. Your penis spoke eloquently to her, addressing her innate fears of dying alone, and this is how you made her yours for only one night. You filled all the empty parts of her that night, and how could we hate you for that, your just a feeding, fucking, sleeping organismo.

Maybe I’m no better by wanting permanence, which could just be stealing a young girl’s life away. Don’t die with regrets… Hump away youthful vixens. How can I be angry that you didn’t die for me, that you didn’t turn off your sex for me, that you didn’t stop your lusting forever when I entered the picture. How gracious I now become knowing that I asked you to deprive yourself for me, how humble now that I recognize that I alone cannot suffice for you. That is of course total shit. I blame furiously.

I apologize for fecklessly losing my objectivity. It is of course this that you ask abjectly from one who narrates this type of experience.

So hero’s go back to whence they came, despite their forthcomings, is that the lesson we learn from this collection of verbiage in the tumult of a below earthen gap? Do you mean not for us to glean a hopeful detail from these cogitations?

“Perhaps we are each a hero to someone out there…“muttered Jake, the elder member of our two man drilling committee. And so it was established. Two corners of thought fighting for supremacy in this narrow crevasse. It was tools dangling and each twitching with the anticipation of some side winning word to wrap up the need for this figurative race to the core of the earth.

“How can I help you, she says to me. On the back of her shirt...” Benjamin gets back to an earlier tangent. It was something about the super market and how it was stealing his life.

“She couldn’t help me, right!? All I wanted was an answer to why I threw my life away.”

And that’s true again! Just like we all throw it away my friend; for lack of better excuses, for lack of any better creativity to draw us away from natural demise. Yet don’t look to me to find the exactitudes of this mess. I’m on the same front, doling out angry bayoneted thrusts to my own attackers of ego and psyche. I’m busy tossing my life away, just like you my friend, except were both doing it alone now, thanks to cicumstance.

Girls go back to school to find themselves anew; to dump or get dumped by prior lovers and to establish a routine of self pity and aggregation of new romance. We do the same too, maybe a job or some summer classes, try to work hard and define this soul of ours. Why would it stick with us, things we failed at, things we now detest every moment of? How could we just go back to law school and sit back in law school, and think of law school, when there was something so burdening inside the three of us.

Why can’t we just fight and get it over with, get our purity back from ourselves. Why these violations can’t be washed away with water, to break those salty stains that we leave on other peoples bodies in the churning heat of the most reckless of moments. Just let it be all of us in a big soapy tub to apologize for hurting each others feelings and discarding the hate of the other floating bodies; slowly but surely.

More of those countless hours float by in the unknowing pitch of dark underground. Sandstones open up lubricious maws to squeeze lamplight through, mostly just taunting an under stimulated mind to wander with preoccupation of the surface. Who knows what horrific deeds were cancelled out by the miles of black rock and dust, though it was no deed of theirs that was being kept from escaping at one time or another into the open gasping air. These thinks of theirs just like middle earth canaries, let out of cages to bolt to the sunny brilliance of the world above their heads, bursting into daylight and watched carefully to see if the survive this foreign world.

Its just sex you would say, perhaps in unison with the girl you though you loved, as she mouthed it to familiar ears. It’s just a physical action, like walking or running, or humping your pillow somnambulistly in the dead night. Screwing you defined as a desperate filling.

Maybe not even that. Maybe you were just hurting and needed more. Maybe it had nothing to do with me at all. Damn. All this time spent thinking I had a purpose; to fight this defilement. Suddenly it becomes painfully clear that I’m less in control than I ever thought. But at least I live up top here!

Hammer…

Pickaxe…

Diamond bit drill…

Your hands work quick unfastening what sedimentary formations thought they had firmly put into place. Your sharp commands bring your implements effortlessly into your hands. Sweat hardly discernable under the bellowing breath of the caverns, its humid and esophageal atmosphere. Then it’s the constant clamor of cathartic brain noise, like the hint of religion on someone’s tongue; your thoughts of heroism burning a hole in your psyche.

“Perhaps each one of us has that special someone, somewhere, waiting for us…” Jake incited, causing Benjamin to exhale briskly and emit conical funnels of dust from each nostril. His tools whirred to a stop and his eyes fell to the abyss below his dangling feet.

“How can you say that…?” Came cautiously from pursed lips and closed eyes, a head focusing on an impossible focal length.

How can you say that Jake? Waiting for us like some fucking miracle of creation beget us each a perfect love, to be found and conquered like a fairy tale tragedy. Jake, you have been immersed in this tunnel too long, hidden from UV and perhaps lacking of vitamin D synthesized by your skins contact with natural light. If not, if you are less than maniac and trod nearer the truth, then I humbly bow out of this contest. I knew love in my own heart and could not even begin to permeate the fastidious little seed that our deep earth mariner had planted inside that questioning heart.

I live on the goddamn top, and that’s not enough. I can’t play king of the mountain. I just live on ground a bit closer to the sky.

Thanks for that one last chance my friends. They are aspirating gently on dimly chilled guttural winds. In the belly of the beast, each mind yet a muscle to the end means of this oblivious organismo. We, just wheat in its colon; corn in its undulating stomachs. Can’t you hear the winds a blowing, but it’s the beating of a heart, and were all under the fist of idealism, waiting for our daylight when we are finally digested and make the wet plunge to clod or sidewalk alike.

Detonation caps sing songs of finality that we can never know; searing the rock and blaring its last horn for all the world to hear. Sometimes it is as those little rock holes fall in on themselves, just like our escapes to the outside world, leaving us alone with ourselves in velvet oblivion.