Sunday Story

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 skinny 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.

The More Things Change...

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:

cowardice

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.

The Sacred and the Vulgar

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

Lone Wolf Tickets

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:

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

...

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

Blockhead, Insomniac Olympics


Sparks, I Wish I Looked a Little Better (1983)

Narrative Blowback

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.

Oblivironia

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.

Fall Designs for the Dollar

"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.