Chapter Nine

Beatnik writing crap: If you’re here then be here, no fear, she said but she’s dead, echoes of a hypocrite. You look like her, he said, did he mean I look dead, no, he was looking at me like I’ve never been more alive; strange how I never felt more alive. I’d like to kiss you knowing that you kissed her; does that make me weird. I want her to be alive I want to know what she felt when she kissed you, can you make that happen can you read my mind do you know that I loved you like crazy and that I might be crazy still, will you want to know me better. I’m sunk, I want to go deeper, I want to get wetter, I want to slurp the wet and want what I get and look at you oh my god it kills me to see you that way looking at me that way, please tell me that’s okay, so what do you want to do? Kill boredom, kill me with a kiss or two, god please, I want this to be a beginning, to end this talk of nothing, let the future wait I want it now.

I wrote poems, scribbled thoughts, doodled in my notebook on the road, usually while in the van. Horrible high school poems; first drafts, the types that maybe seem good to the author in the moment the ink leaves the pen in the flow, while in the speed of the van with whatever current song sound-tracking the prose, but a moment after in a moment of silence of course the poems reveal themselves to be embarrassing ‘high school’ poems of wishy-washy tortured prose of pretention and politics and art for art’s sake and too grandiose ideals of what life is and could be, and wants and what not, but whatever. Here’s two things I wrote about Las Vegas:

The gaudy lights blight the stars, neon streams glitz The sights seizure artificial signals sins are free here Prince Harry strip pool and race the dim-wit Olympic swimmer in the pool and steal Mike Tyson’s tiger; pretend you’re in a movie, are a different person, that money Is only a dream and imagination and pink; money to evaporate in the desert heat Fake New York, fake Egypt, fake Venice towers of swank and façade meant to allure And blur time into illusion; come big player, see the peep show, the illusionist the artsy acrobats See the cleavage and the sad dog faced losers helplessly losing in the bling, bling. blinging of the Casinos. A mirage. Had fun.

*

Desert heat excite me here is where greed lives and I want To live greedily Seth and Kang snuck out I think to seek something sinful I ate a handful of grapes in the Rainforest Café a fake Thunderstorm hammered down and I looked at the zebra Fish encased in the giant aquarium it looked real cool, we Walked, shopped, gawked, secretly gambled, saw a near naked Dancing lady on a table Laid in bed, showered, almost kissed him The lips who kissed her, my sister, I hardly wondered, is my sister still dead?

*

And here’s what I wrote about the Grand Canyon:

They come to see a hole in the ground The grandest hole in the ground A deep canyon A spectacular scar on the earth The most spectacular scar, the widest, deepest, grandest scar In America, in the world; such beauty in the hurt Looking down. Marvel at the majesty Look deep, deep down. The columns of rocks, the stripes on the rock The arrays of reds and purple and sand colors, the light of the sun on the rocks Changing their colors throughout the day, the canvas for living light paintings Come look See the thing The hole In person Then leave There is no filling it There is no real feeling it either.

*

“You know what I was thinking when looking at that view?” Seth-Rem asked on the drive away from The Grand Canyon.

“What?”

“Bioshock Infinite.”

“The videogame?” Kang asked.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I have no idea,” Seth-Rem said. “It’s a beautiful video game. The graphics. A masterpiece.”

“That’s not the type of thing you’re supposed to think of,” Leena said.

“I can’t help what I think of,” Seth-Rem retorted. “I also thought of Eagles and Indians and mules.”

“I thought how nature is ancient,” Candice said. “And how small we are among it, in it. All those billions of years. And we’re just a spec.”

“Like the same feeling when star-gazing,” Leena said.

“And we could die by a bullet shot by a madman with a assault rifle at any moment and our government wouldn’t care,” Candice said.

“I wish you’d get off that,” Seth-Rem said.

“30,000 die in America from gun violence a year. About 6,000 lost their lives from terrorists in the U.S. since 1970. Think of that. Because of terrorist threats we can’t bring toothpaste on an airplane and have given up our privacy, spent all this outrageous amount of money and time consumption, venture out on reckless wars costing thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, but no one wants to do anything to try and fix the gun violence problem, despite evidence that in fact, something could be done to lessen it.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to be inspired by thinking of the gun debate while looking at the Grand Canyon either,” Kang said.

“Not really a debate,” Leena said. “The gun nuts win, because they can muster the most anger and scream the loudest and intimidate congress the most effective. A crying mother has no impact. A white knuckled lunatic clinging a gun shouting angry slogans does.”

“What did you think about Alice?” Candice asked.

“Nothing,” I answered, with a shrug.

Candice nodded her head as if I had said something profound.

I hadn’t really thought of nothing. It’s impossible to think of nothing because your brain, like your heart, is a machine that doesn’t turn off until death. And even then, maybe not even that stops whatever entity you are from somehow continuing to have thoughts, somehow. If ghosts and such are real, like evidenced in those “ghost hunter” paranormal investigating shows suggest. Looking down at the Grand Canyon I wondered how much rain it would take to fill it. What event could make god so sad that his tears would fill the Grand Canyon. A dumb thought; a ‘high-school amateur poem’ type thought. That’s why I didn’t share it. Of course it doesn’t rain very much in a desert. That’s what makes it a desert.

Strange, this desert here is so close, relatively, to the rain forest of the Pacific Northwest. Or not so strange really, I guess, it’s just geography. And it’s not so close, really. A lot of driving time between the two. And just about all of the western half of the United States is technically a desert, I think. Except for this one little sliver up in the northwest area between the coast and the cascade mountain range. When you live there, grow up there, you don’t really realize you live in any kind of geographically rare place. You know the rest of the country has pegged your home as being excessively rainy. Every place outside of where you live has to be summed up with one adjective. For people in L.A. and New York every place between those two cities are known as the fly over states. The only place that really matters is the place where you live, just as the only person who really matters in this great big universe is just yourself.

Except that’s not true at all. For society to function you have to consider the world, places and people outside yourself. Have empathy. For strangers, for places you’ve never been and will never go to. Most of the problems of the world; crimes, politics, wars, poverty, intolerance, hate, anger, hunger, violence, comes from people not being able to empathize or who think empathizing is a worthless and weak trait if it doesn’t advance the self; only caring about themselves. Hating gays until they find out their son or daughter is gay. That type of thing. Hating poor people, then they become poor; poor people hating poor people because they’re told to by leaders who manipulate them into hating themselves because the poor hating the poor and hating themselves is what’s best for the rich and the real winners in life. Angry blathering about it. Do society a favor and kill yourself; you cost too much, you leech. Hypocrisy; the rich are leeches too, with their tricky tax evasions and subsidies and Caribbean accounts, but when they take from the government it is noble and freedom fighting, when the poor get government assistance it is anti-freedom leeching, they claim.

You can love yourself without being selfish.

I love the rain. Staring out windows while it rains hard and relentless. Big windows of a fast food place. KFC. A four way intersection out the windows, near a park. Abba playing over the speakers. S.O.S.. The power goes off. Just for a moment. A minuet. Then the power comes back on. The rain remains steady. I had been watching the clouds, dark patches of clouds, grazing across the sky; one cloud blocks out the sun, darkens the sky, then moves past and it is bright again, the sun’s rays magnified through the windows, the light and heat spilling onto the table. Then the gray overcast envelopes the whole sky and the rain fell. And it was nice.

What are you thinking about Alice, Candice asked.

Nothing, I answered.

I fucking hate it when their biscuits are hard, Leena said. No amount of honey can fix this. Whose idea was it to come here anyways?

Sorry, Kang said.

Was that in Colorado? Maybe Utah. I remember the mountains out the window.

People not native to the Pacific Northwest hate it; all the rain. It doesn’t really rain as much as people think there. Not daily; in summer, weeks can pass without any rain. But there are a lot of rainy days and overcast skies, comparatively, I suppose, to places like Southern California and Arizona. And when it does rain, many times the rain will last all day. Outsider people don’t like that. They like to see the sky, the sun. They miss the blue. They say the trees makes them feel claustrophobic. They’re too often denied a flat horizon line. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, I think. All the trees make’s it feel like you’re constantly being hugged by nature. Maybe that’s a hippie type thought (Hippies were the predecessors to beatniks, weren’t they; but with more of an emphasis on drug fueled music rather than drug fueled literature) but maybe the Northwest nature has a way of turning people hippie-ish.

Driving through Arizona, Leena said we need a good sing along song moment. She said Abba’s “Dancing Queen” was a good sing along song. She found it on her iPod and it blared through the van stereo speakers and we sang loudly along. It was a great moment. She was right; we needed to be enlivened a bit, beginning to feel a bit sluggish from the long highway drives. There’s a type of meditative beauty in the monotony, and the inducing sleepiness it compels can give a comfortable tingling type sensation, but there’s some agitation and itchy boredom that can come as well, no matter the amount of portable entertainments and distractions; some are more prone to those negative road travel inflictions than others, even with all the mobile portable electronic time wasters available; the iPod and cell phone games, videos, movies, reading, for those who can read while traveling without getting headaches. “Dancing queen, only seventeen, dancing queen, whoa-oh-oh; you can dance, you can jive, having the time of your life.” Really a great song. Always sort of made me a little sad for some reason. There’s a strain of melancholy in it, I think, like, this foreboding lurching over that song this ‘dancing queen, just seventeen’s’ night of ‘having the time of her life’ will end, and it was all fabricated by false emotions, dance and music as an escape into something wonderful, some dance wonderland, but once the music and dancing ends, reality thuds down and it’s sad she’s only seventeen and she already had the high point of her life; a moment to be languidly nostalgia over when she’s sad and old for the forever years ahead.

I don’t know; the melody sort of makes me think that way more than the lyrics; it’s not a party whoop-whoop type song the way more current party dance songs are, all in the moment; it has this sort of reflecting swing to it, in the melody, and I guess I’m saying melodies do evoke their own emotions and feelings, even without lyrics. “Next, ‘Tiny Dancer’ like in ‘Almost Famous’” Leena said. So she played that and we sang along loudly to that and that was fun to do too, having our cinematic experience, although if this road trip could be a movie our sing along to ‘Tiny Dancer’ wouldn’t mean anything the way it does in that ‘Almost Famous’ movie when they sing along to it in their tour bus; the beauty of youth being the glorious naivety of believing one day you’ll be famous.

Some of them, the young, will grow be homeless, hungry, soaking in the rain, walking aimlessly to nowhere, looking ugly, smelling bad on the street. Once pretty smiles kissing however many swooning girls sold on the naïve belief they may love someone someday famous or rich, now with missing and rotting teeth and dry cracked lips, even in the rain. ‘We are young’ sang that one band ‘fun.’ Which was a recent anthem type hit ‘so let’s set the world on fire.’ They were actually not all that young, early 30’s I think, when they recorded that, although they were a ‘new’ band, so young in that sense I suppose, but you wonder why someone in their 30’s would make up a song like that ‘we are young’ song. Wishful thinking. Writing vicariously, in a non biographical voice, the way young adult novel writers, writing in the ‘voices’ of first person narratives of teens are actually usually 30 something or 40 something years old. Maybe he was remembering back on a time when he was young, when he wrote it, and had dreams of being in a successful band, being played on the radio, getting a Grammy nomination, or just being carefree and reckless in the way only young people can sometimes get away with, longing for that type of freedom again, a mental type of freedom, in ‘being young’ and thinking that gives you the right and privilege to ‘set the world on fire’.

But then his 20’s end, and the dreams are unfulfilled, and most bands, any good bands or singers mostly do their best work, make their biggest impacts, in their 20’s, so maybe he thinks it’s all over, or wants to refuse that reality, so gets drunk, reminisces over past feelings of youth, and writes that ‘we are young song,’ and it, unlikely and lucky as it so happens, becomes a youth anthem and is played on top 40 radio, and all those dreams, of being in a successful band, being played on the radio, getting a Grammy nomination, all ended up coming true. I don’t know; that’s kind of an interesting thing I guess, which shows, even if you don’t make an impact in your 20’s, there’s still a chance in your 30’s, if you pretend to be young and write from a youth perspective? I don’t know. That Carly Rae Jepson lady is almost 30 but she wrote this song with this middle school mentality that appeals to those little girls who decided our culture now, what’s popular and gets attention in pop culture, so there’s another example, with meaning that I guess is sort of lost on me. Don’t give up, even when you’re getting old? I don’t know. Tiny Dancer. ‘Hold me close Tiny Dancer… duh duh duh on the Highway.” We really yelled the ‘On the Highway’ line.

“Does it ever rain here?” I asked.

We talked about future jobs. A studio executive would be a good job.

“Literally anyone could do it,” Seth-Rem said. “Not only do it, but do it just as well if not better than whoever’s doing it now. Any random schmo of any age or gender off the street.”

“Well not anyone,” Candice said.

“Anyone who’s watched TV before. We all know crap when we see it. Decide what gets green lit and what doesn’t.”

“There’s some who are lucky,” Leena said. “And all things considered, you’re a lucky one.”

“That’s true,” Kang said. “All considered, we all are, really.”

“I loved her, you know,” Seth-Rem said to me once, in the backseat.

“So did I,” I said.

“You’re pretty you know,” he said. “I don’t think you know that. You should know that.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You look like her,” he said.

I didn’t know what to say.