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Date: Thursday, 19 Nov 2009 08:07
Norwalk Funeral
A junkie wore a faded Hawaiian shirt, without censure, to the funeral; an inept but honest attempt at formal attire, everyone understood. He and a woman stood off to the side, with that tragic, impassive look the aging ones get. Their dessicated faces are rendered immobile; their mouths become narrow, grim, constricted in shame. But their eyes plead uncomprehendingly from their stony masks, as if there are children trapped inside, mute and powerless witness to their own self-destruction.
In a sense every junkie carries his childhood flash-frozen within, stunted and fossilized; of the dozen or so present that August day they were mostly children when they went in for the needle.
The first and only time someone attempted to recruit me for the death march I was about sixteen. He meant no harm. He was a cool guy.
"I wish I had veins like that," another once remarked about the same time, admiring my scrawny arms; he seemed to think I was letting them go to waste. His own veins had collapsed long before in a spontaneous and futile attempt to save the body.
The hypodermic is a sort of bottle, and the user's nodding reverie resembles the untroubled sleep of the newborn. He is as dependent upon his surrealist-nightmare version of the baby's bottle, itself a mechanical approximation of the breast. But he is not nourished into autonomy; he is relieved of it. He has inverted the process, passing backward through stages of dependence into non-existence.
Death may be his final station, but it is incidental to his pursuit. The junkie is compulsively seeking out the pre-conscious state. He cannot return to the womb so he substitutes oblivion. Junkies have "committed to the process", like true artists. They are as devout as fanatics. They are the devotees of the religion of gratification, and have found the direct route to their god.
Despite his knack for creating it, the junkie hates chaos. The junkie has it all figured out; he knows what he will do with his life; he has a plan. He has eliminated uncertainty; his life will revolve around his habit, his love. What he wants is to escape the layers of personalty he has accumulated over time. He wants to eradicate himself to experience the consequent unburdening.
Junkies will accept their shame and failure; they will lament the pain associated with the life they've chosen; but they will never disparage the high. It's the most sublime state they've ever known, they readily and invariably say. I cannot trust these impressions too much. Only the junkie understands the junkie; a brotherhood like no other.
Someone once said a poem can only be conveyed by another poem; likewise the junkie's high. It can only be experienced, never understood.
Some may object to calling it love, but love it is, as deep and abiding as any. Her only moral failing was weakness. She was set-up at birth, by an absent father who's only lasting legacy was a propensity for addiction. A junkie picks the easy marks among the young as they grow into promise, like a pimp at a Greyhound station. The streets of Norwalk churned them out with similar regularity. But while the pimp exploits for money, the junkie exploits for companionship--the shared misery of their kind. The junkie community is a vampire's coven; one is initiated by blood into a state of alienation from humanity, neither dead nor alive.
The turnout was good; she was well-liked. The few remaining respectable adults of my old neighborhood, once giants to me, were old and stooped. The children were now middle-aged and weathered beyond their years. The children were distant and foreign.
The priest was reedy in voice and physiognomy. The service was offered as a charity, and the priest did not eulogize as much as proselytize; we were lectured like hobos waiting for a bowl of soup at a mission. The only way to truth is through the book, he said, holding his over-sized bible up in his trembling, scrawny arms; I worried he would drop it. He was in a losing competition with the vampire junkies for the souls of the weak.
When the priest asked for eulogists Howard came forward. Now about fifty, his speech came in slow, faltering streams. He was stooped and grey; he had lived in shortened junkie years for a long time. Leaning on his cane he drifted into one stuporous eddy after another, lamenting the death he had likely set in motion years before. I suspect it was he who introduced her to the needle; he was about thirty and she about sixteen. Weak and pathetic, he wasn't even a figure sufficient for focusing a hatred that I could not muster anyway.
A friend of hers rose and spoke movingly, then another, and I thanked God for the natural grace of women. But as if it wasn't enough to leave it at that, a young man rose to speak. He did not know her well and was not well liked by her. He suppressed a smile as he spoke. He was indulging in an opportunity to draw attention to himself, to parade before the young women in the crowd. He destroyed our small moment of dignified remembrance obliviously, and returned to his seat smiling.
Later I was working the crowd with nervous energy, in between the service and the burial, as if to speed up the humiliation of a graceless, cut-rate funeral, looking for something I was sure I would recognize if only someone would reveal it to me. I bore down on them one after another, thanking people for coming and shaking hands. Two of Howard's brothers were there, two more of a large family of mostly sons; former terrors of the neighborhood, they were fattened, shrunken, rounded out. Two little Mexican gargoyles.
I went over to the aging junkie pair. They eyed me warily as I approached. Later it occurred to me the possible source of their trepidation: they might have felt they were under suspicion for complicity in her death. We did not know yet if she overdosed, or if her heart failure was simply a consequence of her degraded health. I could not convince them that I did not care. They understood, as I only later realized, that they were complicit one way or another by virtue of their comradeship in arms. They didn't expect me to understand. They didn't know that I felt the greater shame. It probably did not occurr to them that I was the one who failed her in my absence; they, after all, befriended the sister I abandoned. But I know.
A junkie wore a faded Hawaiian shirt, without censure, to the funeral; an inept but honest attempt at formal attire, everyone understood. He and a woman stood off to the side, with that tragic, impassive look the aging ones get. Their dessicated faces are rendered immobile; their mouths become narrow, grim, constricted in shame. But their eyes plead uncomprehendingly from their stony masks, as if there are children trapped inside, mute and powerless witness to their own self-destruction.
In a sense every junkie carries his childhood flash-frozen within, stunted and fossilized; of the dozen or so present that August day they were mostly children when they went in for the needle.
The first and only time someone attempted to recruit me for the death march I was about sixteen. He meant no harm. He was a cool guy.
"I wish I had veins like that," another once remarked about the same time, admiring my scrawny arms; he seemed to think I was letting them go to waste. His own veins had collapsed long before in a spontaneous and futile attempt to save the body.
The hypodermic is a sort of bottle, and the user's nodding reverie resembles the untroubled sleep of the newborn. He is as dependent upon his surrealist-nightmare version of the baby's bottle, itself a mechanical approximation of the breast. But he is not nourished into autonomy; he is relieved of it. He has inverted the process, passing backward through stages of dependence into non-existence.
Death may be his final station, but it is incidental to his pursuit. The junkie is compulsively seeking out the pre-conscious state. He cannot return to the womb so he substitutes oblivion. Junkies have "committed to the process", like true artists. They are as devout as fanatics. They are the devotees of the religion of gratification, and have found the direct route to their god.
Despite his knack for creating it, the junkie hates chaos. The junkie has it all figured out; he knows what he will do with his life; he has a plan. He has eliminated uncertainty; his life will revolve around his habit, his love. What he wants is to escape the layers of personalty he has accumulated over time. He wants to eradicate himself to experience the consequent unburdening.
Junkies will accept their shame and failure; they will lament the pain associated with the life they've chosen; but they will never disparage the high. It's the most sublime state they've ever known, they readily and invariably say. I cannot trust these impressions too much. Only the junkie understands the junkie; a brotherhood like no other.
Someone once said a poem can only be conveyed by another poem; likewise the junkie's high. It can only be experienced, never understood.
Some may object to calling it love, but love it is, as deep and abiding as any. Her only moral failing was weakness. She was set-up at birth, by an absent father who's only lasting legacy was a propensity for addiction. A junkie picks the easy marks among the young as they grow into promise, like a pimp at a Greyhound station. The streets of Norwalk churned them out with similar regularity. But while the pimp exploits for money, the junkie exploits for companionship--the shared misery of their kind. The junkie community is a vampire's coven; one is initiated by blood into a state of alienation from humanity, neither dead nor alive.
The turnout was good; she was well-liked. The few remaining respectable adults of my old neighborhood, once giants to me, were old and stooped. The children were now middle-aged and weathered beyond their years. The children were distant and foreign.
The priest was reedy in voice and physiognomy. The service was offered as a charity, and the priest did not eulogize as much as proselytize; we were lectured like hobos waiting for a bowl of soup at a mission. The only way to truth is through the book, he said, holding his over-sized bible up in his trembling, scrawny arms; I worried he would drop it. He was in a losing competition with the vampire junkies for the souls of the weak.
When the priest asked for eulogists Howard came forward. Now about fifty, his speech came in slow, faltering streams. He was stooped and grey; he had lived in shortened junkie years for a long time. Leaning on his cane he drifted into one stuporous eddy after another, lamenting the death he had likely set in motion years before. I suspect it was he who introduced her to the needle; he was about thirty and she about sixteen. Weak and pathetic, he wasn't even a figure sufficient for focusing a hatred that I could not muster anyway.
A friend of hers rose and spoke movingly, then another, and I thanked God for the natural grace of women. But as if it wasn't enough to leave it at that, a young man rose to speak. He did not know her well and was not well liked by her. He suppressed a smile as he spoke. He was indulging in an opportunity to draw attention to himself, to parade before the young women in the crowd. He destroyed our small moment of dignified remembrance obliviously, and returned to his seat smiling.
Later I was working the crowd with nervous energy, in between the service and the burial, as if to speed up the humiliation of a graceless, cut-rate funeral, looking for something I was sure I would recognize if only someone would reveal it to me. I bore down on them one after another, thanking people for coming and shaking hands. Two of Howard's brothers were there, two more of a large family of mostly sons; former terrors of the neighborhood, they were fattened, shrunken, rounded out. Two little Mexican gargoyles.
I went over to the aging junkie pair. They eyed me warily as I approached. Later it occurred to me the possible source of their trepidation: they might have felt they were under suspicion for complicity in her death. We did not know yet if she overdosed, or if her heart failure was simply a consequence of her degraded health. I could not convince them that I did not care. They understood, as I only later realized, that they were complicit one way or another by virtue of their comradeship in arms. They didn't expect me to understand. They didn't know that I felt the greater shame. It probably did not occurr to them that I was the one who failed her in my absence; they, after all, befriended the sister I abandoned. But I know.
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)" Tags: "unfinished, fiction"
Date: Sunday, 15 Nov 2009 01:07
From a former jar-head friend now working in Afghanistan as a contractor:
About the only thing you really need to stockpile is patience because it's a military/government project, where the sad but common saying is "f--k up, move up". You'd be astounded at the incompetence and how deep and swift it can flow through here sometimes. You remember.
I want to make an anti-Ken Burns documentary someday, for our decade's Iraq/AfPak project: over stills of soldiers in the field, accompanied by a soundtrack of melodramatic strings, a voice over (is James Earl Jones still doing voice work?) reads letters and emails home; but instead of co-opting the chivalrous eloquence of the nineteenth century to romanticise the massacre from the comfort of our temporal remove, we get the contemporary voice and the gruesome comedy. Plain, unsentimental, profane, resigned. And a thousand times truer.
Oh, wait. It's been done:
About the only thing you really need to stockpile is patience because it's a military/government project, where the sad but common saying is "f--k up, move up". You'd be astounded at the incompetence and how deep and swift it can flow through here sometimes. You remember.
I want to make an anti-Ken Burns documentary someday, for our decade's Iraq/AfPak project: over stills of soldiers in the field, accompanied by a soundtrack of melodramatic strings, a voice over (is James Earl Jones still doing voice work?) reads letters and emails home; but instead of co-opting the chivalrous eloquence of the nineteenth century to romanticise the massacre from the comfort of our temporal remove, we get the contemporary voice and the gruesome comedy. Plain, unsentimental, profane, resigned. And a thousand times truer.
Oh, wait. It's been done:
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)"
Date: Wednesday, 11 Nov 2009 08:41
This is a little embarrassing.
I thought I might write my way out of here. Setting messages in virtual bottles adrift in the electronic ether. Someone would find one, send out a search party. I would finally join society, whatever that meant. I had an idea of what it was, gleaned from a lifetime of secondhand accounts warped by the demented lens of electronic media. These posts are my various attempts to mimic that, to conjure in reality what I see in representation, as, increasingly, is the whole of my behavior. I'm a one man cargo cult.
Years ago, before my self-delusion was finally spent, before I finally accepted as chosen this isolation incrementally achieved through countless retreats from various relationships to the "outside world", that is to say humanity, I thought of my existence as taking place in a darkened room. There is a door somewhere, but I can't see it. I can only grope about in the dark, walking the wall with my hands. I could not know if I was endlessly retracing the same circuitous route in a tomb, or moving down an endless hall. But as long as I had faith in the existence of the door I was alright. It would lead me out; I would have friends, lovers, enemies. I would be normal, finally. This has been the unachievable goal I've set for myself. I would be part of a greater whole, drawing strength from it, rather than a whole unto myself, consuming my own psychic innards until my hollow, gelatinous shell caves in upon itself in a rubbery heap.
But delusion fades over time. Now I know: there is no door. The darkness is mine, projected outward. I cherish the room as all I know, because it is. I don't want to leave, therefore I cannot leave. I'm going to die in here. But I do miss the idea of the door. We are all precisely where we have chosen to be.
Save yourselves.
I thought I might write my way out of here. Setting messages in virtual bottles adrift in the electronic ether. Someone would find one, send out a search party. I would finally join society, whatever that meant. I had an idea of what it was, gleaned from a lifetime of secondhand accounts warped by the demented lens of electronic media. These posts are my various attempts to mimic that, to conjure in reality what I see in representation, as, increasingly, is the whole of my behavior. I'm a one man cargo cult.
Years ago, before my self-delusion was finally spent, before I finally accepted as chosen this isolation incrementally achieved through countless retreats from various relationships to the "outside world", that is to say humanity, I thought of my existence as taking place in a darkened room. There is a door somewhere, but I can't see it. I can only grope about in the dark, walking the wall with my hands. I could not know if I was endlessly retracing the same circuitous route in a tomb, or moving down an endless hall. But as long as I had faith in the existence of the door I was alright. It would lead me out; I would have friends, lovers, enemies. I would be normal, finally. This has been the unachievable goal I've set for myself. I would be part of a greater whole, drawing strength from it, rather than a whole unto myself, consuming my own psychic innards until my hollow, gelatinous shell caves in upon itself in a rubbery heap.
But delusion fades over time. Now I know: there is no door. The darkness is mine, projected outward. I cherish the room as all I know, because it is. I don't want to leave, therefore I cannot leave. I'm going to die in here. But I do miss the idea of the door. We are all precisely where we have chosen to be.
Save yourselves.
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)" Tags: "stream of consciousness, confessional"
Date: Wednesday, 11 Nov 2009 07:44
Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ day is not. So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
--Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)"
Date: Tuesday, 10 Nov 2009 08:28
A question. Has anyone yet attempted to leverage yesterday's tragedy at Fort Hood into a defense of the Patriot Act's "lone wolf" provision? Maybe the question is not if, but when. I'm thinking of starting a pool.
Of course it may not be necessary. Yesterday* the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to extend three provisions: roving wiretaps; section 215, or the "libraries provision" diminishing privacy rights; and the "lone wolf" provision, which should probably be renamed the "pack of wolves" provision, for its potential (arguably inevitable) future misuse against political "radicals", as defined by whatever pack is in power.
[*correction: the House Judiciary Committee voted on Nov. 5 to allow the LW provison to expire; the Senate Judiciary voted last month to extend all three]
update: Speaking of grassroots terrorism, if the Seattle police are right, a man now in critical condition who was shot and arrested earlier today for the assassination-style killing of a Seattle police officer was waging a terrorist campaign of his own (with at least one accomplice) against the city's police department. According to police, Christopher Monfort, an Obama-lookalike with a similar biracial background, is also a suspect in an arson case involving the torching of several police vehicles at a motor pool. The arsonist left a note promising to kill police officers. Monfort is a University of Washington graduate and sometime activist:
update II: Seattle police now claim to have found bomb-making materials and more evidence linking Monfort to the arson and the murder, and have declared him a "domestic terrorist."
update III: After initially speculating that Monfort acted with one or two accomplices, they are now saying he acted alone
Of course it may not be necessary. Yesterday* the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to extend three provisions: roving wiretaps; section 215, or the "libraries provision" diminishing privacy rights; and the "lone wolf" provision, which should probably be renamed the "pack of wolves" provision, for its potential (arguably inevitable) future misuse against political "radicals", as defined by whatever pack is in power.
[*correction: the House Judiciary Committee voted on Nov. 5 to allow the LW provison to expire; the Senate Judiciary voted last month to extend all three]
update: Speaking of grassroots terrorism, if the Seattle police are right, a man now in critical condition who was shot and arrested earlier today for the assassination-style killing of a Seattle police officer was waging a terrorist campaign of his own (with at least one accomplice) against the city's police department. According to police, Christopher Monfort, an Obama-lookalike with a similar biracial background, is also a suspect in an arson case involving the torching of several police vehicles at a motor pool. The arsonist left a note promising to kill police officers. Monfort is a University of Washington graduate and sometime activist:
Monfort received a bachelor's degree from the UW in March 2008, according to the university's degree-validation Web site. His major was in Law, Societies and Justice.
Last year, Monfort belonged to the McNair Scholars Program, part of the university's office of Minority Affairs and Diversity. The program aims to steep undergraduate students in sophisticated research, preparing them for graduate work.
Monfort provided this title for his project with the McNair program: "The Power of Citizenship Your Government Doesn't Want You to Know About: How to Change the Inequity of the Criminal Justice System Immediately, Through Active Citizen Nullification of Laws, As a Juror."
In an abstract of his project, Monfort said he planned to "illuminate and further" the scholarship of Paul Butler, a law professor at George Washington University. Butler is a proponent of jury nullification, a controversial principle whereby jurors feel free to disregard a judge's instructions and acquit a defendant no matter the strength of the evidence.
Butler has argued that such nullification may be particularly appropriate in cases where black defendants are charged with nonviolent crimes.
"It is the moral responsibility of black jurors to emancipate some guilty black outlaws," Butler wrote in a 1995 Yale Law Journal article, adding: "My goal is the subversion of American criminal justice, at least as it now exists."
update II: Seattle police now claim to have found bomb-making materials and more evidence linking Monfort to the arson and the murder, and have declared him a "domestic terrorist."
update III: After initially speculating that Monfort acted with one or two accomplices, they are now saying he acted alone
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)" Tags: "twits, politics"
Date: Saturday, 07 Nov 2009 05:50
The single most distressing result of Barack Obama's election is not the looting of your grandchildren's economic prospects to pay for the new administration's Great Lurch Forward into insolvency. It isn't the accompanying loss of liberty. Nor is it the mass decampment of "anti-war" leftists now silent or openly supporting the escalation of the war in Afghanistan (so that's what they mean by "MoveOn"). No; it's the ascendance of shameless kitschmeister Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas, whose "Yes We Can" video on behalf of the Obama campaign took the cliched political cant that is rap's tertiary stock-in-trade (after gangsterism and narcissism) to surreal and sinister levels, putting it directly in the service of power. The natural process of his passing down through the Dante-esque circles of celebreality television into ultimate obscurity is now delayed by at least four years.
Witnessing Bob Dylan's participation in Pepsi's cloying, Super Bowl-launched ad campaign ("every generation refreshes the world") alongside Will was like finding a beloved elderly family member working as a carnival geek. To a remixed "Forever Young" a sixties-era Dylan passes the baton (in the form of a pair of wayfarer sunglasses) off to Will. If this was a true representation of the state of popular music, the g-forces induced by such a sudden drop in iconic quality would cause the culture to pass out. Don't panic--it isn't. The raw material of humanity hasn't been left out overnight to spoil, and there are as many talented young people as ever, in and out of hip hop. Just don't tell Mr. Dylan. Like his early eighties "conversion" to evangelical Christianity, the less said of this embarrassing interlude the better. Let's give the president a pass too. Let him think that Puff Daddy and The Black Eyed Peas are relevant, that Wanda Sykes is funny (if that woman has ever said anything funny, it was surely an accident). There are too many meaningful delusions of which he will have to be disabused, by argument and circumstance, over the next four years, to worry about the trivial.
Now I learn from the blog Where Hip Hop and Libertarianism Meet (only to find they have nothing in common, I'm sure--no worries, Big Man Fascism, your muse still only has eyes for you) that Will.I.Am will be caddying the carpet bag for Terry McAuliffe (who Will identifies as his "closest political mentor") as he stumps for the governorship of Virginia. It's going to be a long four years.
Witnessing Bob Dylan's participation in Pepsi's cloying, Super Bowl-launched ad campaign ("every generation refreshes the world") alongside Will was like finding a beloved elderly family member working as a carnival geek. To a remixed "Forever Young" a sixties-era Dylan passes the baton (in the form of a pair of wayfarer sunglasses) off to Will. If this was a true representation of the state of popular music, the g-forces induced by such a sudden drop in iconic quality would cause the culture to pass out. Don't panic--it isn't. The raw material of humanity hasn't been left out overnight to spoil, and there are as many talented young people as ever, in and out of hip hop. Just don't tell Mr. Dylan. Like his early eighties "conversion" to evangelical Christianity, the less said of this embarrassing interlude the better. Let's give the president a pass too. Let him think that Puff Daddy and The Black Eyed Peas are relevant, that Wanda Sykes is funny (if that woman has ever said anything funny, it was surely an accident). There are too many meaningful delusions of which he will have to be disabused, by argument and circumstance, over the next four years, to worry about the trivial.
Now I learn from the blog Where Hip Hop and Libertarianism Meet (only to find they have nothing in common, I'm sure--no worries, Big Man Fascism, your muse still only has eyes for you) that Will.I.Am will be caddying the carpet bag for Terry McAuliffe (who Will identifies as his "closest political mentor") as he stumps for the governorship of Virginia. It's going to be a long four years.
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)" Tags: "culture, hip hop, twits, politics"
Date: Sunday, 01 Nov 2009 04:22
EXT. NIGHT
A half moon partially illuminates a farmhouse in the distance. We hear something, gradually growing louder. Just as we begin to make it out as the sound of screaming, a young couple appears in the foreground running for the house. The girl stumbles; the boy, looking back in terror, yanks her back up, very nearly dragging her along as he runs.
REVERSE ANGLE
We are in a clearing, looking at a forested grove that is barely more than a black mass in the dim light. There is movement there; something is emerging from the forest.
QUICK CUT TO
INT.-FARMHOUSE
The two are barring the door behind them.
BOY
We’ve got to find something to block the windows.
EXT.-VIEW FROM THE CLEARING
We see now that it is a group of people coming out of the woods approaching; a chaotic, growing mass.
INT.-FARMHOUSE
The boy has pushed an old sofa against the door. He turns his attention to a window, looking around for something to bar it with.
EXT.-VIEW FROM THE CLEARING
The group has overrun our view now; they are pale and slack-jawed, moving along with the stiff-limbed, mindless action of the walking dead.
INT.-FARM HOUSE
The boy is hastily nailing a piece of scrap wood across a window using a large rock for a hammer. He turns and shouts.
BOY
I need more nails. Anything that will work.
The girl is turning over drawers in the kitchen frantically. She finds a box of nails and hurries out. The girl gives the nails to the boy.
BOY
Good. Now, any wood you can find. Knock the legs off of that table there, we can use that. And see if you can find a real hammer.
EXT.
We return to our original view of the house. The zombies are converging on it.
INT.
The boy is knocking a door off of its hinges. He drags it over to a window.
BOY
One more. Come on. Give me a hand.
He peers out the window.
BOY’S POV
Looking out a dirty window into the night we see no sign of the zombies.
BOY
I don’t see anything.
The girl joins him, handing him a hammer. They start to lift the door into place. Suddenly, a pair of arms bursts through the window, grabbing the boy. He raises the hammer and strikes the zombie on the forehead. It drops instantly.
CLOSE SHOT-GIRL
She is screaming, her hands raised in fists held at the side of her face.
REVERSE ANGLE
More hands come through the window. The boy starts hacking away at the zombies with his hammer but they just keep coming.
BOY'S POV
A zombie reaches for the boy’s neck. The boy strikes him with the claw side of the hammer; it makes a sickening crunching sound, lodging in the zombie’s forehead and slipping out of the boy's bloody grip as the zombie falls away.
ALTERNATE VIEW
The zombies are pulling the boy out the window. The girl grabs hold of his legs, desperately trying to pull him back in. She is gradually drawing him back inside but now the zombies are reaching in and clawing at her. She’s jerking her head back and forth to avoid their clutches, but their feeble, grasping hands are starting to become entangled in her long, straight hair. She is losing her grip on the boy. She screams as his legs slip out of her grasp and he is pulled out. She turns to run but they are upon her now; they have hold of her legs, her clothes, her hair. She's fighting valiantly but it’s no use. They drag her out the window.
EXT.-GIRL’S POV
From the ground she is kicking and punching frantically, but for every zombie that falls two more replace it. Her arms and legs are now futilely struggling in the grasp of countless zombies' scrawny, pale arms. One is coming in toward our view, toward the girl’s face. As he advances, the last thing we see while fading out to the sound of the girl's terrified screams is a word emblazoned across the front of his t-shirt:
UNTETHERED
A half moon partially illuminates a farmhouse in the distance. We hear something, gradually growing louder. Just as we begin to make it out as the sound of screaming, a young couple appears in the foreground running for the house. The girl stumbles; the boy, looking back in terror, yanks her back up, very nearly dragging her along as he runs.
REVERSE ANGLE
We are in a clearing, looking at a forested grove that is barely more than a black mass in the dim light. There is movement there; something is emerging from the forest.
QUICK CUT TO
INT.-FARMHOUSE
The two are barring the door behind them.
BOY
We’ve got to find something to block the windows.
EXT.-VIEW FROM THE CLEARING
We see now that it is a group of people coming out of the woods approaching; a chaotic, growing mass.
INT.-FARMHOUSE
The boy has pushed an old sofa against the door. He turns his attention to a window, looking around for something to bar it with.
EXT.-VIEW FROM THE CLEARING
The group has overrun our view now; they are pale and slack-jawed, moving along with the stiff-limbed, mindless action of the walking dead.
INT.-FARM HOUSE
The boy is hastily nailing a piece of scrap wood across a window using a large rock for a hammer. He turns and shouts.
BOY
I need more nails. Anything that will work.
The girl is turning over drawers in the kitchen frantically. She finds a box of nails and hurries out. The girl gives the nails to the boy.
BOY
Good. Now, any wood you can find. Knock the legs off of that table there, we can use that. And see if you can find a real hammer.
EXT.
We return to our original view of the house. The zombies are converging on it.
INT.
The boy is knocking a door off of its hinges. He drags it over to a window.
BOY
One more. Come on. Give me a hand.
He peers out the window.
BOY’S POV
Looking out a dirty window into the night we see no sign of the zombies.
BOY
I don’t see anything.
The girl joins him, handing him a hammer. They start to lift the door into place. Suddenly, a pair of arms bursts through the window, grabbing the boy. He raises the hammer and strikes the zombie on the forehead. It drops instantly.
CLOSE SHOT-GIRL
She is screaming, her hands raised in fists held at the side of her face.
REVERSE ANGLE
More hands come through the window. The boy starts hacking away at the zombies with his hammer but they just keep coming.
BOY'S POV
A zombie reaches for the boy’s neck. The boy strikes him with the claw side of the hammer; it makes a sickening crunching sound, lodging in the zombie’s forehead and slipping out of the boy's bloody grip as the zombie falls away.
ALTERNATE VIEW
The zombies are pulling the boy out the window. The girl grabs hold of his legs, desperately trying to pull him back in. She is gradually drawing him back inside but now the zombies are reaching in and clawing at her. She’s jerking her head back and forth to avoid their clutches, but their feeble, grasping hands are starting to become entangled in her long, straight hair. She is losing her grip on the boy. She screams as his legs slip out of her grasp and he is pulled out. She turns to run but they are upon her now; they have hold of her legs, her clothes, her hair. She's fighting valiantly but it’s no use. They drag her out the window.
EXT.-GIRL’S POV
From the ground she is kicking and punching frantically, but for every zombie that falls two more replace it. Her arms and legs are now futilely struggling in the grasp of countless zombies' scrawny, pale arms. One is coming in toward our view, toward the girl’s face. As he advances, the last thing we see while fading out to the sound of the girl's terrified screams is a word emblazoned across the front of his t-shirt:
UNTETHERED
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)" Tags: "Bumpers"
Date: Thursday, 10 Sep 2009 00:23
Has the media's recoiling fascination with the Angry White Mobs of health care reform's roadshow crippled that effort and stalled the Obama administration?
Marshaling evidence to that effect, liberal codger E.J.Dionne, for one, draws the only relevant conclusion: there is no such thing as a "liberal media bias." In giving the "tea-baggers" all that sneering attention,the media overstated their numbers and fury; and as we all know consequence equals intent and consequences are always intended. Employing their conspiratorial mob tactics (political organization and assembly, raised voices, unfashionable clothing) they snookered the media into acting as their own oblivious man behind the curtain, projecting the illusion of a powerful force. It's a new twist on an old story: idealistic and naive city folk brave the American interior in search of a dream, get taken by slick operating small-towners. It was a Simpson's episode. Of course, eventually everything will be a Simpsons episode.
But the pitchfork extras were too well cast. Like anthropologists happening upon a long-isolated tribe, the press marvelled at these folk, no longer mere legend. For all their habitual rhapsodizing about the historic demographic shift America has taken from shameful homogeneity to the uncertain (but nonetheless mandated Great and Necessary) multiracial beyond, the media was nonetheless shocked to find a retired middle-class as white as the workforce it once was. The past exists only as reproach, and those consigned to it carry its shame like the mark of Cain.
They have no character arc, or future. First this was prophesied, then it was decided. The unease produced in them by the media's endless celebrations of their long-overdue and deserved demise (the post-racial age of Obama) is treated as spontaneous bigotry welling up from inexhaustible depths. The racist nature of their demand for their "nation back" is presumed and condemned in one breath, and made no more understandable by Obama's open claim to the nation on behalf of a new, better people, defined by only by what they are not--white. Those clamoring for their "nation back" are literally guilty of talking back.
Of the accusatory adjectives used to describe the crowds, old and white, the first remains a furtive and facile appeal to an ancient prejudice, but the second has become a pejorative in its own right, encouraging a new sort of bigotry--one not so much sanctioned as it is required. All else being equal, "White" is now a moral failing into which one is inescapably born. How we arrived at this perversion of both Christian and Enlightenment values (in the name, alternatively, of both) remains shrouded not in mystery but coercion. One is not allowed to ask.
Media bias, liberal or not, is nothing more than the aggregate of the influential class' prejudices, fantasies, and phobias. It is not action but drift. Its predictable nature creates the illusion of direction and control. But once set in motion, round and round it goes, where the narrative stops, nobody knows.
Marshaling evidence to that effect, liberal codger E.J.Dionne, for one, draws the only relevant conclusion: there is no such thing as a "liberal media bias." In giving the "tea-baggers" all that sneering attention,the media overstated their numbers and fury; and as we all know consequence equals intent and consequences are always intended. Employing their conspiratorial mob tactics (political organization and assembly, raised voices, unfashionable clothing) they snookered the media into acting as their own oblivious man behind the curtain, projecting the illusion of a powerful force. It's a new twist on an old story: idealistic and naive city folk brave the American interior in search of a dream, get taken by slick operating small-towners. It was a Simpson's episode. Of course, eventually everything will be a Simpsons episode.
But the pitchfork extras were too well cast. Like anthropologists happening upon a long-isolated tribe, the press marvelled at these folk, no longer mere legend. For all their habitual rhapsodizing about the historic demographic shift America has taken from shameful homogeneity to the uncertain (but nonetheless mandated Great and Necessary) multiracial beyond, the media was nonetheless shocked to find a retired middle-class as white as the workforce it once was. The past exists only as reproach, and those consigned to it carry its shame like the mark of Cain.
They have no character arc, or future. First this was prophesied, then it was decided. The unease produced in them by the media's endless celebrations of their long-overdue and deserved demise (the post-racial age of Obama) is treated as spontaneous bigotry welling up from inexhaustible depths. The racist nature of their demand for their "nation back" is presumed and condemned in one breath, and made no more understandable by Obama's open claim to the nation on behalf of a new, better people, defined by only by what they are not--white. Those clamoring for their "nation back" are literally guilty of talking back.
Of the accusatory adjectives used to describe the crowds, old and white, the first remains a furtive and facile appeal to an ancient prejudice, but the second has become a pejorative in its own right, encouraging a new sort of bigotry--one not so much sanctioned as it is required. All else being equal, "White" is now a moral failing into which one is inescapably born. How we arrived at this perversion of both Christian and Enlightenment values (in the name, alternatively, of both) remains shrouded not in mystery but coercion. One is not allowed to ask.
Media bias, liberal or not, is nothing more than the aggregate of the influential class' prejudices, fantasies, and phobias. It is not action but drift. Its predictable nature creates the illusion of direction and control. But once set in motion, round and round it goes, where the narrative stops, nobody knows.
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)" Tags: "politics"
Date: Saturday, 05 Sep 2009 01:51
That's my suggested word for oblivious to irony.
An example. Republican Congressman Eric Cantor, in Israel as part of a 56-member Congressional contingent summoned by AIPAC, repeating a theme developed there to criticize US foreign policy:
"I’m very troubled by that, because I don’t think we in America would want another country telling us how to implement and execute our laws."
Maybe I need to combine oblivion with gall. Yeah, needs work. From Philip Giraldi's Sept. 3 column.
An example. Republican Congressman Eric Cantor, in Israel as part of a 56-member Congressional contingent summoned by AIPAC, repeating a theme developed there to criticize US foreign policy:
"I’m very troubled by that, because I don’t think we in America would want another country telling us how to implement and execute our laws."
Maybe I need to combine oblivion with gall. Yeah, needs work. From Philip Giraldi's Sept. 3 column.
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)"
Date: Friday, 04 Sep 2009 23:23
"Mr. Treehorn draws a lot of water in this town. You don't draw s---, Lebowski."
--The Sheriff of Malibu, TBL
Is this where the overthrow of dollar hegemony will be said to have begun in earnest, after much throat-clearing, with Red China throwing a BRIC through the window at the IMF? Less apocalyptically, in competing with US treasuries as a safe means of global exchange, Special Drawing Rights (IMF notes based on a basket of currencies including the dollar) push US interest rates upward. And up is where the rates of chronic debtors go.
But not necessarily. They interred Michael Jackson today with a parade of SUVs befitting a state funeral (hazard lights set to mournful in the twilight). Half a billion in debt is no small feat, after all. Michael's creditors, having no interest in liquidating his gaudy assets, had him lined up for 50 shows. Put on your dancing shoes, America.
--The Sheriff of Malibu, TBL
Is this where the overthrow of dollar hegemony will be said to have begun in earnest, after much throat-clearing, with Red China throwing a BRIC through the window at the IMF? Less apocalyptically, in competing with US treasuries as a safe means of global exchange, Special Drawing Rights (IMF notes based on a basket of currencies including the dollar) push US interest rates upward. And up is where the rates of chronic debtors go.
But not necessarily. They interred Michael Jackson today with a parade of SUVs befitting a state funeral (hazard lights set to mournful in the twilight). Half a billion in debt is no small feat, after all. Michael's creditors, having no interest in liquidating his gaudy assets, had him lined up for 50 shows. Put on your dancing shoes, America.
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)"
Date: Wednesday, 02 Sep 2009 00:27
Summer ends over a weekend here, usually right about now. The grey cloak shrinks the sky, the fall chill shrinks the skin, my spirit lets out a pathetic whimper, but, as if by design, I'm returned the energy I'd thought, as every year, lost for good to one last August. Doors will reopen this Sunday, muse willing.
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)"
Date: Friday, 14 Aug 2009 06:05
I went to my congressman's (Rick Larsen, Democrat) "health care forum" yesterday, having been compelled by one of the Moveon-type liberal activist organizations that send me emails (I think it was "BarackObama.com").
I arrived at the stadium (of the Seattle Mariners' triple-A baseball team, the Everett Aquasox) two hours early as the email suggested; there was a crowd gathered at the gates. The anti-reform faction had set up a table. A woman with a microphone was reading from a sheet of talking points, her insufficient amplification system being shouted down by the chanting of the pro-reform faction. Whenever someone took the microphone they were drowned out by chants of "Yes We Can" or "Liar, Liar."
The lefties were outnumbered by about 2 to 1, but appeared to be more the product of a unified organizational effort, with pre-printed signs and many in matching t-shirts (the conservatives all had hand-written impromptu signs). The local Democratic Party affiliate had set up their own booth with petitions and campaign-style paraphernalia. People jostled to block their opponents' signs with their own, but mostly kept their hands to themselves.
Eventually a group of young men showed up with Obama-as-Hitler posters. One of them positioned himself behind the conservatives' table as a woman was speaking, holding his sign aloft. He was hustled off by one of the larger conservative men. I later learned this was a contingent of LaRouche supporters. They were all young, with at least one woman in their group, and unexceptional enough in appearance.
At one point an overweight fellow with an effeminate manner showed up with a bullhorn, demanding: "Repeal the Bush tax cuts! Repeal the Bush tax cuts!" He was surrounded by detractors who argued with him for a while; he explained that he was there because the anti-reform protesters were "not welcome" at a "rally for health-care reform." Whether he was mistaken about the nature of the "town hall meeting" or was referring to the preliminary gathering at the gates I'm not sure. While his bullhorn gave him amplification superiority over the conservatives' paltry sound system, he gave it a rest after a few minutes.
After about an hour the conservatives shut down and the crowd calmed. People mingled about showing deference to friends and foes alike; debates broke out here and there; a polite Northwestern version of the contentious battles that are going on across the nation.
When they opened the gates people were passing out question forms but once we got inside Rep. Larsen, after speaking briefly, took random questions directly from the crowd. These were mostly challenges to reform, often lacking coherence or taking the form of statements; this went for both sides. Not all challenges were from the right; one citizen asked if Larsen opposed single payer reform because he had taken "half a million dollars from the insurance companies" (Larsen denied this charge). Larsen denied that illegal immigrants would be eligible and the "death boards" charge. Occasionally there were shouts from the audience, boos or applause; one man stormed over to place himself directly in front of me (if you want to find the crank, he's always right in front of me; it was annoying, but I delighted in pointing myself out to my daughter later on the evening news) and berate the congressman at volume. He shortly relented, sulking off in an exaggerated fashion, muttering that he would "be quiet, for now." This was the single such incident of "shouting down."
If what I saw was a typical example of what's happening at these meetings across the country, then the media is overreacting. But then, as I've pointed out above, this is the polite Puget Sound.
I arrived at the stadium (of the Seattle Mariners' triple-A baseball team, the Everett Aquasox) two hours early as the email suggested; there was a crowd gathered at the gates. The anti-reform faction had set up a table. A woman with a microphone was reading from a sheet of talking points, her insufficient amplification system being shouted down by the chanting of the pro-reform faction. Whenever someone took the microphone they were drowned out by chants of "Yes We Can" or "Liar, Liar."
The lefties were outnumbered by about 2 to 1, but appeared to be more the product of a unified organizational effort, with pre-printed signs and many in matching t-shirts (the conservatives all had hand-written impromptu signs). The local Democratic Party affiliate had set up their own booth with petitions and campaign-style paraphernalia. People jostled to block their opponents' signs with their own, but mostly kept their hands to themselves.
Eventually a group of young men showed up with Obama-as-Hitler posters. One of them positioned himself behind the conservatives' table as a woman was speaking, holding his sign aloft. He was hustled off by one of the larger conservative men. I later learned this was a contingent of LaRouche supporters. They were all young, with at least one woman in their group, and unexceptional enough in appearance.
At one point an overweight fellow with an effeminate manner showed up with a bullhorn, demanding: "Repeal the Bush tax cuts! Repeal the Bush tax cuts!" He was surrounded by detractors who argued with him for a while; he explained that he was there because the anti-reform protesters were "not welcome" at a "rally for health-care reform." Whether he was mistaken about the nature of the "town hall meeting" or was referring to the preliminary gathering at the gates I'm not sure. While his bullhorn gave him amplification superiority over the conservatives' paltry sound system, he gave it a rest after a few minutes.
After about an hour the conservatives shut down and the crowd calmed. People mingled about showing deference to friends and foes alike; debates broke out here and there; a polite Northwestern version of the contentious battles that are going on across the nation.
When they opened the gates people were passing out question forms but once we got inside Rep. Larsen, after speaking briefly, took random questions directly from the crowd. These were mostly challenges to reform, often lacking coherence or taking the form of statements; this went for both sides. Not all challenges were from the right; one citizen asked if Larsen opposed single payer reform because he had taken "half a million dollars from the insurance companies" (Larsen denied this charge). Larsen denied that illegal immigrants would be eligible and the "death boards" charge. Occasionally there were shouts from the audience, boos or applause; one man stormed over to place himself directly in front of me (if you want to find the crank, he's always right in front of me; it was annoying, but I delighted in pointing myself out to my daughter later on the evening news) and berate the congressman at volume. He shortly relented, sulking off in an exaggerated fashion, muttering that he would "be quiet, for now." This was the single such incident of "shouting down."
If what I saw was a typical example of what's happening at these meetings across the country, then the media is overreacting. But then, as I've pointed out above, this is the polite Puget Sound.
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)"
Date: Monday, 10 Aug 2009 05:22
Episode originally aired on Saturday, September 01, 2007
Dread and Mobility
unofficial labor day drunken draft pre-mix
As an adolescent I read somewhere about a society that taught their young how to manipulate their dreams. For them the lucid dream state was a virtual realm in which one could, among other things, confront his fear. These people claimed to have trained their young to make of the common (universal?) dream of falling the opportunity to take flight.
Long before that I was morbidly fascinated by the landscaping around and trapped within the spaces within the freeways of L.A. County. I imagined it as one whole, connected by but the thinnest isthmus in places, yet still one complete, looping and lolling strand of a place. Occasionally you'd see evidence of a pathetic human presence there: an abandoned cardboard bed perhaps, seen in passing, circling around and above on an onramp and looking down into a miniature grove, or glimpsed in the split between two elevated roads, in some gully created by the folds of the Beast (will you allow me this conceit, so I don't have to alternate "interstate" with "freeway" repeatedly?).
From the beginning I was a fearful child steeped in dread. Sighting the artifacts of a wretched human presence in the mossy folds of the Beast thus added to the growing list of potential future personal dystopias, like becoming a "Jesus freak" (in the parlance of the seventies, when Jesus freaks were like harmless but annoying hippies--of course many of them were ex-hippies; whether any souls were saved I'll leave to the faithful, but I believe the evangelicals did save quite a few lives in the late drug era) or a junkie: one could also end up living in a murky crease beneath a freeway overpass. Life seemed to offer unlimited iterations of prolonged, miserable failure.
My recurrent falling dream was influenced by an aerial photo I'd seen once, of a multiple-freeway interchange: an overwhelming profusion of bridge overpasses, connecting roads and ramps, curling and intersecting like grotesque tendrils mating their serpentine hosts. Sometimes anight I found myself suspended in the atmosphere above this, any moment to fall; specifically (somehow I knew) to fall into the iceplant-bound nether-region of the freeway landscaping. Well, it was a short dream, and only vaguely unnerving. A typical Dale effort: a falling dream without the falling.
Aside from the occasional tramp, runaway, or the rare recent release from a nearby mental hospital using the vagabond byways of the mostly razed suburban blocks, three wide, that cut through our neighborhood, intersecting with the encased-in-concrete San Gabriel River (the "Riverbed") running in a gentle bend north to south, we had one resident homeless (resident homeless!) person in the neighborhood where I grew up. "Homeless" wasn't yet in use; we called one in his particular circumstance a "bum." I'm certain that in the battle for common usage primacy, the timeless bum is, in laconic, unsentimental Norwalk, still holding his own against the ranks of the homeless. I'm sure Jesus freak still has a place there too, not far away.
Our resident homeless was also native to the city. Some claimed to know the name of this spectral, grey presence, taking on chameleon-like the hue of the concrete cubbyholes on the underside of the Imperial Highway bridge over the Riverbed where he sometimes slept. That's where we very nearly walked right into him in the dark one night. Someone let out a startled, "who's that?" He answered his complete name, readily (and confirming rumor); just a bit too readily and confidently, to leave undisturbed the comfortable assumption that he was insane and therefore not really aware of and enduring his wretchedness. I could no longer think of him as having an animal's lower level of sensation and awareness; I had to consider the prospect that he suffered, daily, not just the hunger but the humiliation of his circumstance, the realization of his own culpability in his wretchedness. This horrible conjunction of complete responsibility for one's life and the hopeless circumstance of being trapped in one's own skin.
He was not much older than us adolescents; he had gone to school with some of our older siblings. How or why he went directly from high school to homelessness was unknown; he was assumed to be mentally unbalanced, perhaps an LSD casualty. He eventually disappeared. I suspect he moved on, realizing that he could not complete the total abnegation of society that is solitary homelessness if he was still sometimes recognized on the street, to die not long after in some foreign land within a twenty mile radius.
One night I had my falling dream. I remembered the article, and that quickly was in control of a perfectly lucid dream. I soared over the Beast, arms outstretched, banking langorously. Upon waking I was enthusiastic about my discovery. I assumed I had acquired some new ability that lead to who knows where. But I never had the dream of being suspended above the Beast again; and never again would I recognize and manipulate a dream. Needless to say, I would not recall another flying dream. Retracing my steps in the waking world, I was unable to find any evidence of the dream-people.
********
An inborn dread, a sort of latent panic familiar to my line, preceded me. This conviction that things will go wrong was perfectly unshakable by any device of socialization, rebellion, or medication. Ironically, this same fixedness in the breast of its unfortunate host makes it perfectly portable, and impervious to geography--maybe this is why my people have propelled themselves across all parts of the globe, if flight from this dread; maybe this is why now they seem determined to self-dissipate as a race. We can run but we can't hide.
Even this curious adaptation works as if it has its own ambition and designs, treating us as the means to our own end. A long line of dull European farmers crossed the Atlantic to become dull American farmers, settling in squarehead country in the perennially freezing dead center of the continent, where we felt at home. At some point we were displaced from land to city, and, characteristically unaware, set upon a modest decline from modest heights. We are being deselected.
The pioneers came west drawn by horses on wooden wheels over wild country. Years later it was rubber on asphalt, a trail of noxious fumes, and little fortitude required. A group bound by no comparable shared act of passage, by nothing in particular. I am of this family.
The last leg of our white trash odyssey was the motor journey into the American West, merging along the way with the Okies and the wetbacks, with the disillusioned alongside the delusional, the failed and the ambitious, those on the lamb and them on the make, all holding in common a crisis of options; to California.
My parents came to California sometime around 1960 with my then infant eldest brother, and my father's (no doubt presumptuous) certainty that his experience as a military policeman would land a job with the expanding LAPD. That this next part isn't a family secret is evidence, like a nonexistent pulse, that the family that should be jealously guarding it is dead. Regardless; my father failed the psychological evaluation for entrance into the LAPD. Upon hearing this many years after his death (news of which was belatedly received, by years for some of us, as well) his eldest son, who knew him as I didn't, chuckled and said, "maybe there's something to those psychological tests."
(...)
We were the people to whom things happened. We were the led. We created nothing and left no real impression. We surfed the wake of the creative and ambitious across an ocean, tramped behind them across a pristine continent, and settled in to toil in their concerns. We settled in, because we are adapted to nothing so much as rooting ourselves to a spot, any habitable land. The farms had passed into the hands of the capable to be made efficient; the same would happen with the industries, and our modest worth would be halved again. A subsequent decline in our numbers is the only decent result; as for us, we'll be taken care of, made comfortable, granted every liberty, even, who knows, there's always a chance the name could rally somewhere, like in some absurd film wherein a pair of morons give birth to a genius. This is not a lament, not a complaint. We haven't pulled our weight for generations. This is our atrophy.
We thought we were moving toward something, up a gentle incline perhaps (because we love nothing so much as a gentle incline, the gentler the better), but we were fleeing this whole time, because that's what dread and mobility combined are, flight. We were fleeing those who have been gradually displacing us for centuries: the smarter or the harder working, the sturdier stock; that is to say, the worthy.
This line, like many, runs out of momentum at the far edge of the world's last continent. Farther afield and more glorious a place than any of my dim-witted ancestors, or me, their dim-witted progeny, has any right to expect. We ran out of room at the Pacific; unable to keep going and impervious to the occurrence of an idea, we settled into our dull torpor, and we amuse ourselves fading away.
Dread and Mobility
unofficial labor day drunken draft pre-mix
As an adolescent I read somewhere about a society that taught their young how to manipulate their dreams. For them the lucid dream state was a virtual realm in which one could, among other things, confront his fear. These people claimed to have trained their young to make of the common (universal?) dream of falling the opportunity to take flight.
Long before that I was morbidly fascinated by the landscaping around and trapped within the spaces within the freeways of L.A. County. I imagined it as one whole, connected by but the thinnest isthmus in places, yet still one complete, looping and lolling strand of a place. Occasionally you'd see evidence of a pathetic human presence there: an abandoned cardboard bed perhaps, seen in passing, circling around and above on an onramp and looking down into a miniature grove, or glimpsed in the split between two elevated roads, in some gully created by the folds of the Beast (will you allow me this conceit, so I don't have to alternate "interstate" with "freeway" repeatedly?).
From the beginning I was a fearful child steeped in dread. Sighting the artifacts of a wretched human presence in the mossy folds of the Beast thus added to the growing list of potential future personal dystopias, like becoming a "Jesus freak" (in the parlance of the seventies, when Jesus freaks were like harmless but annoying hippies--of course many of them were ex-hippies; whether any souls were saved I'll leave to the faithful, but I believe the evangelicals did save quite a few lives in the late drug era) or a junkie: one could also end up living in a murky crease beneath a freeway overpass. Life seemed to offer unlimited iterations of prolonged, miserable failure.
My recurrent falling dream was influenced by an aerial photo I'd seen once, of a multiple-freeway interchange: an overwhelming profusion of bridge overpasses, connecting roads and ramps, curling and intersecting like grotesque tendrils mating their serpentine hosts. Sometimes anight I found myself suspended in the atmosphere above this, any moment to fall; specifically (somehow I knew) to fall into the iceplant-bound nether-region of the freeway landscaping. Well, it was a short dream, and only vaguely unnerving. A typical Dale effort: a falling dream without the falling.
Aside from the occasional tramp, runaway, or the rare recent release from a nearby mental hospital using the vagabond byways of the mostly razed suburban blocks, three wide, that cut through our neighborhood, intersecting with the encased-in-concrete San Gabriel River (the "Riverbed") running in a gentle bend north to south, we had one resident homeless (resident homeless!) person in the neighborhood where I grew up. "Homeless" wasn't yet in use; we called one in his particular circumstance a "bum." I'm certain that in the battle for common usage primacy, the timeless bum is, in laconic, unsentimental Norwalk, still holding his own against the ranks of the homeless. I'm sure Jesus freak still has a place there too, not far away.
Our resident homeless was also native to the city. Some claimed to know the name of this spectral, grey presence, taking on chameleon-like the hue of the concrete cubbyholes on the underside of the Imperial Highway bridge over the Riverbed where he sometimes slept. That's where we very nearly walked right into him in the dark one night. Someone let out a startled, "who's that?" He answered his complete name, readily (and confirming rumor); just a bit too readily and confidently, to leave undisturbed the comfortable assumption that he was insane and therefore not really aware of and enduring his wretchedness. I could no longer think of him as having an animal's lower level of sensation and awareness; I had to consider the prospect that he suffered, daily, not just the hunger but the humiliation of his circumstance, the realization of his own culpability in his wretchedness. This horrible conjunction of complete responsibility for one's life and the hopeless circumstance of being trapped in one's own skin.
He was not much older than us adolescents; he had gone to school with some of our older siblings. How or why he went directly from high school to homelessness was unknown; he was assumed to be mentally unbalanced, perhaps an LSD casualty. He eventually disappeared. I suspect he moved on, realizing that he could not complete the total abnegation of society that is solitary homelessness if he was still sometimes recognized on the street, to die not long after in some foreign land within a twenty mile radius.
One night I had my falling dream. I remembered the article, and that quickly was in control of a perfectly lucid dream. I soared over the Beast, arms outstretched, banking langorously. Upon waking I was enthusiastic about my discovery. I assumed I had acquired some new ability that lead to who knows where. But I never had the dream of being suspended above the Beast again; and never again would I recognize and manipulate a dream. Needless to say, I would not recall another flying dream. Retracing my steps in the waking world, I was unable to find any evidence of the dream-people.
********
An inborn dread, a sort of latent panic familiar to my line, preceded me. This conviction that things will go wrong was perfectly unshakable by any device of socialization, rebellion, or medication. Ironically, this same fixedness in the breast of its unfortunate host makes it perfectly portable, and impervious to geography--maybe this is why my people have propelled themselves across all parts of the globe, if flight from this dread; maybe this is why now they seem determined to self-dissipate as a race. We can run but we can't hide.
Even this curious adaptation works as if it has its own ambition and designs, treating us as the means to our own end. A long line of dull European farmers crossed the Atlantic to become dull American farmers, settling in squarehead country in the perennially freezing dead center of the continent, where we felt at home. At some point we were displaced from land to city, and, characteristically unaware, set upon a modest decline from modest heights. We are being deselected.
The pioneers came west drawn by horses on wooden wheels over wild country. Years later it was rubber on asphalt, a trail of noxious fumes, and little fortitude required. A group bound by no comparable shared act of passage, by nothing in particular. I am of this family.
The last leg of our white trash odyssey was the motor journey into the American West, merging along the way with the Okies and the wetbacks, with the disillusioned alongside the delusional, the failed and the ambitious, those on the lamb and them on the make, all holding in common a crisis of options; to California.
My parents came to California sometime around 1960 with my then infant eldest brother, and my father's (no doubt presumptuous) certainty that his experience as a military policeman would land a job with the expanding LAPD. That this next part isn't a family secret is evidence, like a nonexistent pulse, that the family that should be jealously guarding it is dead. Regardless; my father failed the psychological evaluation for entrance into the LAPD. Upon hearing this many years after his death (news of which was belatedly received, by years for some of us, as well) his eldest son, who knew him as I didn't, chuckled and said, "maybe there's something to those psychological tests."
(...)
We were the people to whom things happened. We were the led. We created nothing and left no real impression. We surfed the wake of the creative and ambitious across an ocean, tramped behind them across a pristine continent, and settled in to toil in their concerns. We settled in, because we are adapted to nothing so much as rooting ourselves to a spot, any habitable land. The farms had passed into the hands of the capable to be made efficient; the same would happen with the industries, and our modest worth would be halved again. A subsequent decline in our numbers is the only decent result; as for us, we'll be taken care of, made comfortable, granted every liberty, even, who knows, there's always a chance the name could rally somewhere, like in some absurd film wherein a pair of morons give birth to a genius. This is not a lament, not a complaint. We haven't pulled our weight for generations. This is our atrophy.
We thought we were moving toward something, up a gentle incline perhaps (because we love nothing so much as a gentle incline, the gentler the better), but we were fleeing this whole time, because that's what dread and mobility combined are, flight. We were fleeing those who have been gradually displacing us for centuries: the smarter or the harder working, the sturdier stock; that is to say, the worthy.
This line, like many, runs out of momentum at the far edge of the world's last continent. Farther afield and more glorious a place than any of my dim-witted ancestors, or me, their dim-witted progeny, has any right to expect. We ran out of room at the Pacific; unable to keep going and impervious to the occurrence of an idea, we settled into our dull torpor, and we amuse ourselves fading away.
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)" Tags: "memoir"
Date: Sunday, 02 Aug 2009 09:00
I'm just back from the land of sand and smog. Neither business nor pleasure. Oh that stale, static air! Oh that oppressive July heat! Oh that mass paranoia, seething just beneath the surface of every human interaction! L.A. has almost completed its transformation into the dystopia of Blade Runner, with none of the film's eerie beauty and all of its tedium. The mayor is an unwitting caricature of a political leader, and everyone is either unaware or afraid to notice. Oh for the days of Tom Bradley's passive, reassuring visage, and Arnold Schwarzenegger's capacity for property destruction and rapine being limited to the multiplex by way of his godawful films. Why, America, was he not deported after Twins? Escorted to the frontier after Kindergarten Cop? We deserve everything we have coming.
Untethered is gearing up to resume the assault. We're going to take that hill, finally. C'mon, you bastards, do you want to live forever?! These are the days to be alive! Recording for posterity the gargantuan death throes of an imperial dream. We're paying witness to this foundering, epic delusion! We'll eulogize a failing race of men! Let's marvel in the spectacle, if there's no escape--and there is no escape--for God's sake!
But I haven't been entirely derelict. You can read my take-down of Larry Summers in this month's print issue of The American Conservative. Unavailable online. Subscribe here.
Untethered is gearing up to resume the assault. We're going to take that hill, finally. C'mon, you bastards, do you want to live forever?! These are the days to be alive! Recording for posterity the gargantuan death throes of an imperial dream. We're paying witness to this foundering, epic delusion! We'll eulogize a failing race of men! Let's marvel in the spectacle, if there's no escape--and there is no escape--for God's sake!
But I haven't been entirely derelict. You can read my take-down of Larry Summers in this month's print issue of The American Conservative. Unavailable online. Subscribe here.
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)" Tags: "announcements"
Date: Sunday, 02 Aug 2009 07:02
My latest TAC contribution is online.
Also offered gratis: Wilson Burman on Bernanke, Chase Madar on Samantha Power, Stuart Reid on the Pope and James Antle on Joe Scarborough.
"Ben Bernanke, Samantha Power, and the Pope walk into a bar..."
Subscribe here.
Also offered gratis: Wilson Burman on Bernanke, Chase Madar on Samantha Power, Stuart Reid on the Pope and James Antle on Joe Scarborough.
"Ben Bernanke, Samantha Power, and the Pope walk into a bar..."
Subscribe here.
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)" Tags: "announcements"
Date: Sunday, 02 Aug 2009 07:01
I'm out on the back porch because the house just won't cool down. Tanned and tawny haired from the sun, looking like an aging surf bum and moving like the just plain aged in the oppressive heat, I swear I'll never complain about the Northwest's lack of sunshine again.
I have my legs crossed--habitually in what I've been taught is acceptable male fashion, ankle on knee and calf not angled too far above the horizontal. Our cat positions himself to look up at me, framed comically by the triangle formed by my propped-up leg. He blinks hello; it goes unacknowledged and he blinks again, more slowly and deliberately. I'm convinced this familiar practice is conscious signalling of affection on his part, born of the circumstance that cats only sleep in the presence of those they trust. He closes his eyes as an expression of this trust. I blink back and he is contented. He stretches languidly before moving on to a shaded spot, where he nearly pants like a dog in the heat. It seems suspiciously overdone, as if he's playing it up, not necessarily for me but for himself. Such as I am doing here. No work will be done today.
I have my legs crossed--habitually in what I've been taught is acceptable male fashion, ankle on knee and calf not angled too far above the horizontal. Our cat positions himself to look up at me, framed comically by the triangle formed by my propped-up leg. He blinks hello; it goes unacknowledged and he blinks again, more slowly and deliberately. I'm convinced this familiar practice is conscious signalling of affection on his part, born of the circumstance that cats only sleep in the presence of those they trust. He closes his eyes as an expression of this trust. I blink back and he is contented. He stretches languidly before moving on to a shaded spot, where he nearly pants like a dog in the heat. It seems suspiciously overdone, as if he's playing it up, not necessarily for me but for himself. Such as I am doing here. No work will be done today.
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)"
Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 2009 22:26
"I've got a motter: always merry and bright!"
--Henry Miller
Mood key shift:
Beck, Hell Yes
Autechre, Second Bad Vibe
Looks like one of the performers from the Beck video.
Lemon Jelly, Space Walk
Voice sample: radio transmission of astronaut Alan Bean describing the sunrise during a space walk, Skylab 3 mission, July 1973
Zero Gs and I feel fine
Note how sampling works as metaphor.
--Henry Miller
Mood key shift:
Beck, Hell Yes
Autechre, Second Bad Vibe
Looks like one of the performers from the Beck video.
Lemon Jelly, Space Walk
Voice sample: radio transmission of astronaut Alan Bean describing the sunrise during a space walk, Skylab 3 mission, July 1973
Zero Gs and I feel fine
Note how sampling works as metaphor.
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)" Tags: "music"
Date: Tuesday, 28 Jul 2009 00:52
Closed for reinvention. Back soon.
update III:
Girlfriend:
"You come home, you order out food...and then you play those stupid Tito Puente albums until 2 in the morning!"
Guy:
"Tito Puente is gonna be dead, and you'll say: 'Oh, I've been listening to him for years. He's fabulous.' "
--Stripes
update II: be sure to check out the beehive to the right of the screen at 0:08. Like a Nascar Nefertiti!
udpate I:
Did somebody say "twang"?
The Osborne Brothers, Ruby, Are You Mad?
I can only think of two forms of original American folk music, the blues and bluegrass. The blues are subterranean rhythms that strip away all pretense and adornment to allow the unimpeded expression of desire and sorrow. Bluegrass is similarly engaged, yet impelled in the other direction, toward the sky. Where the blues and funk envelop you in the soil of earthen, down-tempo bass chords, bluegrass carries you into the heavens on manic high notes. Blues is earth; bluegrass is sky.
The nearness of nature and its inexorable pull are the common feature. Both evoke the primary and unequivocal realities of desire, family, toil and loss. The unavoidable immediacy of these things in the hungry and desperate experience of the rural poor of the early twentieth century is what gives these forms their inimitable beauty. We are drawn to these as authentic expressions of joy and sorrow no longer possible. The American pastoral.
I was trapped in traffic with nothing but an AM radio to distract me, in LA, when I abandoned the droning obscenity of the OJ trial to land on a non-profit station's bluegrass hour. What the hell. Random finds are the best finds. That's when I first heard this song. This piercing, high lonesome lament was like the lunatic ravings of a mental patient. I had "discovered" something that had been there the whole time. Who knew?
Now; leave me alone, I have work to do.
update III:
Girlfriend:
"You come home, you order out food...and then you play those stupid Tito Puente albums until 2 in the morning!"
Guy:
"Tito Puente is gonna be dead, and you'll say: 'Oh, I've been listening to him for years. He's fabulous.' "
--Stripes
update II: be sure to check out the beehive to the right of the screen at 0:08. Like a Nascar Nefertiti!
udpate I:
Did somebody say "twang"?
The Osborne Brothers, Ruby, Are You Mad?
I can only think of two forms of original American folk music, the blues and bluegrass. The blues are subterranean rhythms that strip away all pretense and adornment to allow the unimpeded expression of desire and sorrow. Bluegrass is similarly engaged, yet impelled in the other direction, toward the sky. Where the blues and funk envelop you in the soil of earthen, down-tempo bass chords, bluegrass carries you into the heavens on manic high notes. Blues is earth; bluegrass is sky.
The nearness of nature and its inexorable pull are the common feature. Both evoke the primary and unequivocal realities of desire, family, toil and loss. The unavoidable immediacy of these things in the hungry and desperate experience of the rural poor of the early twentieth century is what gives these forms their inimitable beauty. We are drawn to these as authentic expressions of joy and sorrow no longer possible. The American pastoral.
I was trapped in traffic with nothing but an AM radio to distract me, in LA, when I abandoned the droning obscenity of the OJ trial to land on a non-profit station's bluegrass hour. What the hell. Random finds are the best finds. That's when I first heard this song. This piercing, high lonesome lament was like the lunatic ravings of a mental patient. I had "discovered" something that had been there the whole time. Who knew?
Now; leave me alone, I have work to do.
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)" Tags: "music"
Date: Tuesday, 28 Jul 2009 00:37
Koko Taylor (1928-2009), Wang Dang Doodle
Jimmy Dale Gilmore Trio, The Mobile Line
"It's a league game, Smokey."
The Avalanches, Frontier Psychiatrist
"That boy needs therapy!"
Mint Royale, Show Me
Townes Van Zandt, Waiting Around to Die, from the film Heartworn Highways
Author: "Dennis Dale (ddale@gte.net)" Tags: "music"
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