Monday, December 27, 2004

Orally Yours

I would have to say it was the Spanish who invented oral sex, and for many reasons. The conjugation of a verb or the oral processing of a cluster of R’s pours off the tip of the tongue with a vibration only akin to energy designed to stir a lover’s blood.

Such cunnilingus of speech leaves one no doubt when drawing parallels between a softly bent Spanish T, to the careful angles of luring the clitoris out of its fleshy hiding spots. The O’s are gentle twitches of the lips that brush away troublesome hairs. J’s are muted conveniently to emit a rumble of pleasing echoes; all directed upward the lips, all ferocity of its formation funneled upward to waiting nerves; albeit pert nipples of philosophy or the ecstatic labia of current events. Perhaps the Perineum of politics…

And to the elation residing in the rest of the long vowels… Even the accented Ń; it sends its hungering lips to ridges and senses indescribable by my uptight English tongue. Those sultry diphthongs that light up the Mexican night, driving us all to shudder when it’s finally all through. A thousand young mouths throbbing to the beat of the livid and languid tongue, all wrestling their bodies to give enough force for one more ménage with tonight’s spoken volumes.

What Provocateurs,
What Oral Artisans…

Thursday, December 23, 2004

letters from america - part 1

I’m not convinced that I would make a very good american. For instance; I don’t enjoy the smell of dryer sheets, or Robert Frost. Yes, I am implying an inherent stench in each. How far can I get with this dual barreled burden? A beloved poet raised by our fertile country; and too, the little paper sheets that coat our clothes with anti-static stink and lipid like texture, all put down in one opening paragraph.

Speaking american is like speaking vanilla. Neutral northern accents all but entirely bled of inflection, soaking the earth with white folk stereotypes. Dead tongues twitching to roll an ‘r’ that only comes out with a lisp. Vice Presidents that grin like vultures and that would swoop down to prey if the tight navy suit didn’t keep his flaps in check. Presidents that grin like a dachshund pondering a staircase, brow furrowed, lips pursed as to give clearance to the many very tiny government spy jets waiting in orbit to land upon them.

I have no particular quarrels with apple pie, though a rudimentary staple; or with majestic purple mountains for that matter. So I guess all is well, only a fifty percent loss in ratings, and the band plays on…

Wednesday, December 22, 2004

Whispering Little Nothings

Sometimes, saying nothing at all says a lot. It says I’m angry and it’s only going to get worse by looking at you. It says that problems might just be bad enough that I don’t even want to think about solutions. It says I’m tired of accusing, pretending and having expectations of you. It says I’m at the moment where I need you the most.

These moments go on seemingly without end, only as perforations between us feeling content and alive. They are the abstractions of you fear of being alone, my fear of being happy, and our mutual inability to get the message across.

Those moments spent not speaking; were they hate, or caricatures in you minds eye reminding you not to talk to strangers.

Were you focused on my actions?
… Or my inactions?

Are there stories right now being made in your head, or merely rearranged and held firm with the glue of assumption, all lined up in sequence to make you feel ok with never talking to me again.

I feel trained to believe that this stage is the end of a companionship. Like the body without connection to the brain, such is the people without access to the precious spoken word.

I’ve begun to think this is the probable end to relationships. All quirks harvested and habits revealed, no more curiosity sustaining crop; so it all yields to slash and burn economics.

Six billion hungry mouths packed so tightly, no wonder we get sick of ourselves. Even the recorded voice drawling on while we sleep, television left speaking painfully into lonely space. Gospel shouts to panel walls and paintings of lush French battlefields. War and celebration on the big screens, left open to anyone left on the streets who is unoccupied enough to peep in.

Stereos lined up across countries; tuned in to hear the same radio relayed mix album that we haven’t heard since yesterday. Its barely mixed up with the new birthday announcements and one live segment that comes on just long enough to tell us how many shopping days until X-mass.

Perhaps saying nothing at all will inevitably say so much more than repeating the same empty expressionless phrases that a lover gets all too often. But perhaps too, there is a world inside us that grows smaller and smaller at every day spent at depriving each other of those precious words.

It’s December, again, and the world has some very unflattering ideas still built up about me. The foremost was its instinct for reminding me how bad I was at falling in love. It would trespass all too frequently and speak its mind unto me. “Hey… You got problems babe…”

… And maybe it was still pretty dead on; that damn gravelly voice. But, if I were to ask what it’s really talking about when the subject of love comes up? It would probably have little on its mind but some arrows through hearts and a quote from Plato out of context. The way I see it, the world is out of sorts with what it loves today. Love to you is just another false prophet of hedonism, strung out to dry with garlic necklaces and other fairytale STD remedies.

So we find ourselves another mess of manmade ideas, groping for something organic, and all we find is love? Perhaps. Love is something you can do when no one is looking, when the world is all but a closed eye for the night and you can’t keep it all to yourself.

Love is not in the kitchen making brownies, she is crouching in the bushes, making fun of your lifestyle and cursing the day you chose to repaint your fence.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

New Proletariats…

Congratulations, I have been briefed on the new and natural state of political affairs surrounding the consumerist derivation of sexuality we have come to know. I should perhaps share this manifest with your readers in hopes that recognition of this faltering economic development will somehow spare us all from over consumption demise.

Ejaculate is the brand new proletariat. Anything less than a union for our multitude of young underprivileged workers will not do. Is it not for them that we prosper? Is it not their interests met on the silver screens and the musty bed linens of all in love?

Are we still not simply the bourgeois who go mostly unaware of the needs of our sex, instead consuming it so blind and rapidly that the sweaty hands and uncovered bellies can barely keep pace. It is we who are at mercy to the needs of our engineered masses, those ceaselessly generated and gracelessly unappreciated by our own dedication in a race to arm ourselves with progeny.

Labors of love… Sounds like sweaty innuendo. Greeting cards and skin flicks dance titles in the brain, on the periphery of dreaming, falling asleep to neon signs. It is for this tryst of palpate sensations that the new blue collar marches.

Heavy crosses these burdens, those impermanent satisfactions. Those thirty second trailers of what is to come. The trial membership of lust and date rape and boozy hallway pinches. It is an alienation from the fruits of our labor; right my dead heroes? Such that we cannot bear to look at the faces of our children made in such splendor less states. Such that we cannot tolerate the sense of attraction without foreboding; the inevitable response to a sociological impotence that transcends breeding, and climbs the fruitless limbs of altruism.

Our new minister of propaganda appears on our sets and strips himself of armament, i.e. his pantaloons. The closest secretariat gladly bends over, inspecting the hedonism from inside out. Are we evil!? Exclaim a million marching soldiers in compression shorts or red red lingerie. “God gave me this” shout the old men on rooftops, fingers splayed, it’s supposed to mean peace without your tongue in it.

All hail we say, dangling in the suspense of rejection or satisfaction. I take it back; the world has not changed in one thousand one thousand years. Its currency merely takes the faces of its new hero’s. That is why “fuck you” is the strongest phrase in the English language; and it sells, goddamn baby it sells…



Tuesday, December 14, 2004

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.

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Reel in Realty

“This is a late model ranch home, refurnished with period replication pieces. It was previously a one family dwelling, now trisected into these identical units.”

What she means is that it’s an old broken down home with its original broken down furniture, sold to an old sod with investments on the brain. He reworks some essential plumbing and adds some outlets, shoots up some rough dry wall and makes me a potential home.

“The kitchen is furnished…” as she shows me that all four burners work on the stove and that the fridge light comes on.

“We would just need a deposit and you can being moving in next week. Of course it will be the unit next door, but they are reasonably identical, just that one faces the street.”

Libby walks around the room, making sure she has enough closet space for her ample wardrobe and kitsch shoe collection. They are all great shoes though; I helped her throw away the crappy or redundant ones, now they all fit within select categories and color combinations to give her maximum and practical flexibility.

Don’t know why she cared about closets. Most of her clothing was a large bin of underwear; a throwback from college days when she bragged an entire two months without doing laundry. She had stripes and dots, thongs and boy shorts, solids and diaphanous. Sporty bras, three pronged latch bras, front clasping bras; none that could escape the ruse of my nimble fingers. I looked at her eyes; I think we were thinking that same thing. We laughed together as the realtor was in the middle of telling us how to get to the laundry room and what key to use when the basement is flooding and we have to swim out the skylights. Damn, I had no idea what she was talking about. Then we were out the door..

“You really want to do this?”

The best thing to do is to sit on a question like that; you know she needs a little reassurance but if you give it too quick… Either way; we’re in my car, driving away from another cute brick apartment, wondering in unison about the true identity of the person next to us.

It difficult making that decision to discard your lives apart and trade them into one big mess of getting in each others way. To be immersed in the stage of required symbiosis, am I ready…

“And if we break up, you can have your girlfriends over.” She inserts without a pause of sense, as though that was my main concern. As if I were intrinsically drawn to that subject whenever I spoke of our plausible life together… This was her way of reasoning out of the complicated fluctuation called our relationship; and she was broadening the gap at every word.
“Lots of couples go through this.” She piped in; somewhere between a song and a crosswalk. Was she talking about her cheating problem or about the hesitance to move all of our shit into one pile called home? I was cued and ready for the sweet part that happened routinely in our near weekly cycle of despondence.

The first part of the cycle was a relatively smooth transition, loving words and gentle touches; it was all designed as a compliment to our affection to one another. It was the good part that made all the other things more bearable.

The secondary portion kicked in at random intervals, brought about by tiny things, habits and comments seeping out of their hiding places. It was a stage of precautionary measures and relative defensiveness that generally occurred when something triggered and tripped the jealousy instinct. Some days it was good sex that made us angry. Sometimes it was even sitting leg to leg in her little tub and trying to talk things out, why it would never happen again

The tertiary stage was brief, yet burned gratuitously. It was when I told her that I don’t think I have what it takes to be in this relationship. For me it was that one damn thing, I never could put it down. It was that bitter day in January when I sat at home to start a Camus novel and calm the fuck down; the same day she walked around Pittsburg with an old High School flame and got her confused little brains banged out.

The last, it was wonderful state of reconciliation. We flooded all of this into an hour or less of apathetic detritus. We argued and blamed and screamed with our hearts. We lashed tongues; we hid our wet faces in pillows and blankets. I can see it replay like some gaudy pantomime. We would get through it all again, we would finally tell each other what we needed to hear, the stuff that maybe we even meant when we said them, and that’s the scary part. We were just so damn honest and open, even after all the shit; that very moment of glory and indulgence.

Perpetuate Cycle… Now…

I L*VE you Johny. I L*VE you too Libby.

“You really want to do this!?” Her head rocking in my periphery, fighting my concentration and attention to the surrounding lanes for a bit of eye contact and some assurance that she isn’t just handing her check over to some half ass.

“Maybe we need this…” It just came out of me live relieved gas. It just felt right to say, felt forgiving and rewarding. I wanted it to be real; just the way I intended it, I wanted to stop this cycle some day.

“There are lots of places to do it in the cabin!” She said with a manic excitement. She was being playful now, coaxing me out of my shell and into a sensual mood. This might have been her defense route against pending emotional danger, disarming me with powerful sexuality; this I realized late in the relationship.

It was true anyhow. When we were given a friendly little tour of the cabin we researched those details whenever we were out of earshot or at eyeball range.

The air had a hint of hippy too it, some nice mountain folk renting from a lady botany Professor in Ca. We even went online to read a couple of her dissertations, to see if she was groovy enough to add to our new list of acquaintances.

The stairs were wide enough to fit us when entangled. We giggle. The washing machine was low enough. The bathroom sink was bolted on nice and tight. This tour was an experience of innuendo. We said thanks and dreamed for nights about holding each other forever in that little back yard.

“Ya, lots of places…” I said; nothing else on my mind but images and fleeting emotional gasps as I put together more reasons for and against the move.

“You should come with me this summer…” She said it quickly then went back to staring out the side window uninterestedly. Very coy. She even went far enough to clip some good jobs out of the local paper for me; and then we both entertained the though of driving that thousand miles together to spend a summer amidst the Steelers and the Amish.

“Lots of places…” That’s all that could come out of my stupid grinning lips. The mile rolled on and we rolled even father apart. I never could get over the affair; and she probably got fed up with my shit in the meantime.

How much can you expect two people to overcome anyhow? No goddamn Romeo’s over here baby. Just two people with time to kill and some nice apartments that need some credit secured lovebird to fill it up with their kitsch shoe collections and drums of groovy underpants.

Lots of places indeed, except that we gave up a long time ago on finding them together. Cast your heavy line in the chilly Atlantic, mine ill put with vigor into the frisky Gulf of Mexico. Reel in your catch kiddo, and let it be reality this time. Let it be the bright shining lips of just a bit truer of a world on your gilded hook. A world where I loved you for as long as you let me, and even just a bit longer…

Monday, December 06, 2004

It was the best of times…

It was the best of times…

Ok, who am I kidding? It’s the same old story of starting your life over that I’m certain that people getting this letter are sick of hearing about. People come and people go, often quicker than they came, and life assumes this surreal sequence of instability. Surges of association and experience; touching, talking, sharing food, all an explosion to the impermanence of nerve stimulation…

Sometimes, merely having your health is more of a bane than anything else. When Jessica had her brush with quick crawling skin cancer she seemed crazy and alive, unlike the middle aged angst we all stumble into. It drove her out of the house kicking and screaming, but I can’t say that was the wrong choice either. When Amanda sat in that chair to get her first pump of chemo; I wish I knew what she thought. Day by day, hour by hour... I’m sure we both tried to get the message, but it came through convoluted. When you said ouch, I’m sure it was a pain that was beyond your skin and bones; I knew that then too.

It’s not as though I envy chronic or incurable illness, or even the last minutes of life. It’s perhaps that as I watch the crowd around me fall to their ends, there deserves analysis of the freedom attained by instant recognition of the inevitable.

I look at my own life now; as a curious person must do; and add up the parts that I think need my remembering. Everything is a hiss and blur, like I never had time to clean up; to organize. Perhaps that’s why I like starting over; and over; and over… Maybe that’s the time cancer gave you, the moments to slim down your collection of half eaten and misplaced brain wrinkles.

Try writing seriously about chronic illness as “Shrek Two” gets funneled into the background in a surprisingly comical Spanish translation. Half of it is some footage of a little kid’s birthday party and lots of snippets of the energetic music tracks and enticing action animation. Gotta love the half breed called special occasion and event coverage; because these are the times I will cherish forever; funding my survival by helping the kind folks re-remember their lives in clear colors and perfect focus.

I’ve been awake too long, and everything on me stinks; even if I smell dryer sheets it’s all gotten old as my day draws on. I’m sleeping on couches and eating out of boxes. I’m reminded of a promise I made myself when I was younger and more naïve; I was going to find something to call home and stay there.

I pride myself of the fact that all of my earthly belongings fit in my car. Maybe that was shooting too big. Maybe feeding that is way too much responsibility and I should have only taken what fit on my back. Take a bus down, see the country…

Several explosive romances and a beautiful child later, I’m breaking my own promises by the day; and who’s not to say forever. People find me charming and mysterious enough to smile in front of and then curiously avoid. Love becomes a game of catch instead of hide and seek; and then love becomes freeze tag on a July morning when you run, run, run until all you can taste is the fog and your own snot. Nobody wins… but nobody cares. So physically deceptive…

Maybe my back is too much. Maybe I should have taken what fit in my pockets. Better get my best suit ready to make the journey, because I need to make a good impression when I get there. Tuck toothpaste in my lapel and call it good enough to go. Adventure, it’s like an instant grab bag of satisfaction, and there could be any amount of dollar store wonders waiting for you inside.

Still sleeping on couches, eating dry noodles like a candy bar and wondering why you feel so alive after all. That’s why I don’t believe that god is made for people like me. God is made for spiritual exhibitionists. God is made for the well off. God is made for people who don’t think about where bouillon comes from, just where it goes when the wife puts it in the water. God is made for those with enough extravagance to afford the weighty job of not needing to know a damn about what’s going on out there, on the battle front of reality.

So people come and people go, usually too late to save your thoughts on them. They pass like pinpricks in the lamp shade of night; just as you swing the whole thing around your head to drive the loneliness out of the room. “Get out” you scream, but even “it” doesn’t respond to you…


Wednesday, December 01, 2004

Handing Out Dimes at Said Corner Store

The world had several ideas about me lately that weren’t too flattering. Initially it was a preoccupation with reminding me how bad I was at falling in love. It would rub it right in my face, “You got problems babe”.

And maybe life was right. Perhaps if it read in bold letters on my lapel “how’s my living”, I would get what you really think of it all on some tidy 1-800 voice mail. A good antiseptic tiding from across the phone might just kick it all into shape; let me know really what I was doing wrong.

Really, how many times can you fool yourself into thinking how different a relationship will be next time? Every time a great dance ends, you remind yourself of the things you learned, things you won’t yell again, or ways to keep a partner smiling, it all meant something… I’m sure everyone gets tired of starting over, but we can’t seem to set the brakes.

Today, none of that spoke even a whisper above the clamor of the plaza. Its open spaces were rife with the usual antiquated ideas of open air commerce. Hot dog vendors fit neatly between cell phone merchants and littered again by the occasional bible thumper. For your convenience, you could pick up god and a new pair of ray bans today, and you didn’t even know who to thank.

That was my stroll down 10th street, teetering at the few spots that still pandered to foot traffic. I watched life going on at an exaggerated speed. Hundreds of people lying in some estivated state of consumer activity, seeking bargains with their heat pits and striking with closed eye when the time is right to save.

Bells clinked and feet patted down sticky sidewalks. Holiday employees vied for attention, leering from behind red velvet or musty beards, driving us all out of our minds with those bells.

Somewhere among the whole dance of over stimulation; someone, somehow, knew that it was all getting too out of control. To many arms slinging money, and stooping for change, and grabbing the last doll or dump truck effigy. Too many eyes darting like protective mothers, but with their eggs at home!

His bell landed with a thud on the sanded pavement. I turned to pan upward on lavish figure. Sandals and a Santa suit, with a worn canvas shirt under cheap rouge velour, this was the anti-Clause. We were collectively awed.

With no interruption in the procession of events, he stooped with eyes upon the crowd. He inspected with a half turn the bent dome of brass, and then with a slowly building beat began the chiming again, though different. Now instead of a humble grin and an urge to put your change in his melancholy bucket roja, he balked the attempts with his body language. His free hand passed in slow motion before our astonished eyes and plunged to the wrist in dimes, nickels and such; the occasional folded bill and numerous glued together pennies.

“Help the Needy!?” he screamed out with a questioning anger.

“You are the Needy!”

Nobody prepared for this; they all began to fall from ranks, mothers grabbing children, any children, running for their lives.

The bell soared over the crowd and skittered across asphalt, under cars and out of our minds. Hands reaped the bucket, our new Santa wild with glory, grinning maniacally and tossing handfuls of dirty discarded change into the air to land on the terrified and amazed alike.

I must admit, I laughed like a delighted child in the rain; even if it was a rain of snotty pocket metal. Our new Santa preached against this breed of moral ambiguity that we believe with all our little heart in. He said take your fucking bread crumbs and come back when your strong enough to help anyone at all.

I backed up a step to avoid another rush of the infuriated and could not help brush shoulders with a dark haired girl.

“You like the show?” She quipped, taking the bump in stride and using the opportunity.

“It is a delightfully right way to start the evening.”

She smiled and in taking my hand we walked past all the disgusted folks who raised their hands in anger; who swear at he who dares interrupt them with only 20 shopping days ‘till Christmas.

She told me first about the Navaho Indian tribe, right out of the blue. Not with an eye of reverence, but just alluded to their customs and intricacies in a way that made me wonder how our culture would be described in a thousand years by some prudish history novel. We laughed and compared, deconstructing societies heavy blocks one by one.

It was strange how all her stories seemed to say to me “we are not just the byproducts of society.” How right she was, because watching the growing craziness from the truck stop window was enough to prove what happens when a single mask is let down.

“They worshiped the sun… But not as a god you see, more of a…”

“Respect? Acknowledgement?” I would fire back.

“Maybe that’s important…”

“What’s left to respect...? Ourselves?” I quipped with a furrowed grin, letting out my laughter.

All she could do was laugh, and carry me on with her, until we had every other restaurant goer gawking in our direction. We seemed to say “Of course not”, and that was enough of a philosophy for us.

Strangely we all met later at the truck stop. Our sad red clown staggered in, tired from performing, and we invited him down with a knowing nod. We talked about love, wealth and the scrambled eggs. He left that night as we sat in refracted street lighting and we tried to make him out through the window glare. My companion though she heard hoof beats as he sped away from the store, but I swear it was an old brown Vespa scooter. Either way, the meaning is what we make of it as growing brooding individuals. I for one will be leaving out chili and hash browns for my new Santa hero this year; albeit he might just be on the road instead, his haver sack full of clean underwear and no shiny toys for Mr. Johny.

At least he has my goddamn respect, as we both pull at the same strings and padlocks, trying to let ourselves out of that big cold box called complacency.

And as for the Navaho…