Horizon Burning

After a day of working at my job in downtown New York, I came home to find my facebook page lit up with news about the Michael Brown verdict. I'm betting hundreds of people are/have already written about this, but the sense of trepidation and guilt I feel is burning me on the inside.

It's unjust, and a portion of me expected the not guilty verdict. The police in this country have steadily been overmilitarized to the point of parody, given deadly military surplus weapons that they themselves are not trained on. They are police. Not soldiers, no matter how badly they want to be soldiers. This is how fascist death squads operate, people. A gun should never be your first tactic. The police carry nonlethal measures that are just as effective at dropping a violent suspect without needless loss of life.

The stories have been there, buried in headlines or floating on the internet. It's a symptom of the mountain of oozing corruption and pseudopatriotic pus that we were spoonfed since 9/11.
The time of "your government will protect you" is fucking over. The people have spoken, and cities are burning.

Is that enough of a message?

Attn: Executive Staff

Dangerous radicals threaten our country. Their insidious methods and unstoppable rhetoric are a serious danger to the natural order of things. If they continue to spread their lies and propaganda...

Then people will listen.

And by god we can't have that! If they listen they might think. And if they think, then they might vote! And when they finally figure out that voting does fuck all to stop the flood of oozy corruption and money that pumps through our veins instead of blood then we'll really be fucked.

Release headlines! Call up the celebrities! Get another fifty tons of cocaine delivered to Hollywood, stat, and make sure those goddamn hoodlums in the ghettos are listening to the latest plastic bullshit we cooked up in the boardroom yesterday. Wave your hands in the air, don't care. Get cash get money. Get drugs get honeys. And if by some absolute fucking miracle you do make enough to be a threat it won't matter. We've already got our poison in your brains, and now you're just like us. Those morals you swore you'd never give up aren't shit compared to the power of playing with lives and livelihood.

Suck it dry. All for us, none for you. The ups and downs of the economy are mere distraction. Our towers of glass and steel shield us from the common man while the future of this country rips itself in two with but a handshake across a shiny wood table. That's the bottom line, and god bless America.

Long live the dollar! Long live greed! Long live ignorance! These give us our power!

AND THE BEST PART IS, NO ONE WILL READ THIS! NO ONE WILL SEE! AND THOSE WHO DO, WELL....

These dangerous radicals threaten our country.

Vaporized

I get home at about 1 am on days when I work my 3-11 shift. The commute isn't too bad, as I can usually sleep on the hour long train ride home, then get into my house with enough energy to burn an hour or two on the computer. One thing I never expected to see at that late hour, when everyone is sleeping, is a huge plume of smoke as I drive down the road.

Panic sets in, and the inevitable foot pressure on the gas pedal, until I advance far enough down the street to see my own home untouched ( with all the lights on). The fire is coming from our next door neighbor's house. His family is huddled across the street, staring at the front of their house, the only hint something is wrong from that end is the smoke issuing from the windows, and a glimpse of orange through the open door. Then I turn the corner, and the back of their house is a chaotic curtain of flame, tongues of evil lashing across the siding, their roof, and their lives. It consumes everything, and the cop cordons off the area while I stand outside with my family, awestruck and selfishly relieved, but still worried. The fire might spread.

It didn't. But the threat was there and so was the fleeting panic. I can only imagine how my neighbor and his family must feel right now. Watching a fire take the material possessions of another is a harrowing experience even if your own life was not touched by the flames. I can't help but feel odd, pity and empathy mixed with relief and a twisted, ugly interest. Everyone loves a spectacle, or so the media would have you believe.

Physiologically, the mix of burning rubber, insulation, shingles, propane, and memories catches in my throat. My mother is coughing up a storm, but me and my brother don't cough. We;ve been tempered in the construction field of New York, and have built up a resistance from three years of breathing in dust and other airborne detritus. I still feel the effects of the flames as I sit here writing this. My body feels tight, and my head is swimming like I've smoked too many cigarettes. I've no doubt i'll wake up tomorrow lethargic and sore. The last sounds I'll hear before I go to sleep are the hum of the remaining fire engine and the low radio buzz of their announcements and direction.

The last thing I'll see will be that sky high plume of heat touching clouds of smoke above the air, and the river of smoking water flooding the street.

Streamline, Don't Add

The great machine spins its rusty cogwheels. Flecks of rust and dirt crumble into the air and float down into the fine layer of detritus that surrounds the solid base. The springs are rusted, providing no stability. Yet still the mechanical energy grinds along, for if it stops who can start it again?

The engineer is far too old. His hardhat is cracked and stained with oil. His machine has out-evolved him, a paradoxical mashup of ancient history, modern technology, and future prototypes. He cannot hope to understand how it works now. He can only bang its exposed parts with a wrench or tighten a loose bolt. The knowledge he had once made this gleaming steel juggernaut hum with efficiency. Now it is rusty and patchy, chugging along at half capacity at best, but with the continued assurance of "perpetual motion" that only the men in the research lab are faithful in. Amalgam of technology, built on the past yet crosswired and reprogrammed for a future that does not seem bright to the old man dutifully pressing buttons he is told to. Once he could take this machine apart, tell you what each part did, then reassemble it and run it at 110%. Now the sickly green glow from the beast's center dizzies him, and the extraneous lasers that shine out of rusty screw holes do not belong there.

The engineer does not know what his job is anymore.

Burrows, Gin, and Gangster Guns

Noise. Light. And a hollow metal tube speeding screaming through a dark in-between. Pay to see the tigers, museum. Members free, but the exhibits are caged.

Motionless, a candy cane sickness sleeps in the corner. Round corners of a cornered round, one last round to put the loud ones over the edge. I have to move my bag for Grandma Pelvis. A cloud of choking dust settles on the seat and a clown with the face of the day asks what time it is. What time for who? You or me?

It doesn't matter. The chewy fruit youth stumbles into our mobile galaxy, bringing a somber mood and the raw passioned plea for acknowledgement. He wants an honest dollar. No one looks. I give him ten but refuses his wares politely. Charity seems empty for some reason and the loss of money hurts less than this unknown sadness. More suited to losing their words in my ears, and now the shame of past phantoms has caught up with me.

The empty station has such pretty lights. Glimpsed through plexiglas for seconds at a time. Like galaxies in an Italian telescope. Feeling like a junky without the junk. I burrow through the words of past prophets and wonder if their nicotine screams mean anything. A rose of plant and dairy wanders past and spreads her petals lewdly. I travel every day but go nowhere. Like a subatomic hitchiker, leaping from A to B and making no real progress.

Time to go.

The River

Getting off the last stop on the E train is a fleeting experience. The platform is arranged so that the clearest exit is at the very end of the station, a long shiny run way leading towards the metal tangle of grates and turnstiles. It's an image that the more cynical of us might compare to a sewage treatment plant. I call it the river Manhattan.

It's everywhere, that mad rush of people bustling down the streams and eddies of the sidewalks towards wherever life requires them to go that day. The picture of the river invites piscine comparisons, but the truth is, we're pebbles. Some shinier than others, smoother but bland, others rough hewn and inclined to stick or divert course. Geologic rubble tumbling through the Lower Sediment. We're not the salmon.

The salmon swim above us, sleek and fat in their ascending glory, chauffeured by the societal equivalent of artificially constructed steps built with good intentions. The pebbles can only hope for little pieces of floating shit to settle down and provide some fleeting dreams of ascendancy. Vicarious motion. The only thing any individual salmon fears is a bearish predator, but that can only do so much before another spawns to take its place, helped along by those oh so convenient steps.

One pebble is an annoyance, but a multitude of sufficient speed and momentum is a fucking shotgun blast.

One person's trash....

The world runs on stories. Almost all stories are about a journey of some kind, either personal, or physical, or emotional. The path we take from A to B to C and beyond. What a lot of people don't realize is that it's not only people who have stories. Objects, philosophies, places, names, words, all have a history behind them.

Flea markets are one of those love/hate things. Something about people trying to sell their used items for extra money, as if they didn't get enough use out of it, galls some people. But there's a charm to flea markets, a sort of atmosphere that evokes an old world bazaar. Sure, there's stalls full of broken knick knacks and tarnished silverware, but for people who have certain interests, there's that metaphorical genie in a bottle just waiting to be found.

I went to one of New York's local markets with my aunt the other day, and had an amusing time perusing the oddities. Burlap sacks from the days where marijuana would have been shipped wholesale, proudly printed with its country of origin. Heavy iron pie tins, and steel kitchen implements that wouldn't look out of place in a civil war surgeon's bag. An ornately decorated sword for fifteen dollars, which upon closer inspection possessed a blade so loose as if to guarantee a hole in the wall upon your first practice swing. Pins from presidential campaigns of old, proclaiming the wearer's fondness for Ike or their premature faith in Nixon.

There was an antique army helmet, of US make, dating back to WWII, the faded date of 1943 stamped on the inside. It intrigued me, and I agonized over buying or not buying it, because although an interesting and unique item, 70 dollars could be spent more sensibly. Alas, when I returned it had walked off with someone not so conflicted. However, positioned next to it had been a German helmet of similar design, except badly pitted and rusted by what looked like seawater.

Going back to the topic of stories, it made me think about the two helmets, and both their stories. The Allied helmet was in good condition, not struck by any sort of visible damage. It's owner had most likely survived the conflict, and brought it back home, only to sell it to this antique dealer. The axis helmet, however, was in very bad shape, A large hole in the back of the helmet belied it's owners fate, shot down on some foreign beach somewhere, the lifeless corpse half submerged in sandy surf. His helmet having failed in its sole task, consigned to a salty, slow decay. Then most likely, some hours, days, or months later, recovered and sent to next of kin, or to the state, or to some other unknown location until it ended up here in New York in 2014. Did the wearers of both helmets meet on the battlefield?

The point of this long rambling tangent is that although the more undamaged helmet held more interest to me initially, it was ultimately the rusted and chipped helmet that hid the more interesting tale. Sometimes, the more damaged something is, the greater depths it has.

As it is with objects, so is often the case with people.