JOURNAL "UNTO THE DESERT" 20OCT2022 (FARWEST)

My heart hurts.

Colored black in the shifting strata of the near-endless depths of the earth, the scraping flaking of the continents colliding oh so slowly over millennia. Hello to the new millennium! Hello sons and daughters! Hello fall of the towers! Hello rise of security fences and metal detectors! Oh, the nostalgia of american paranoia, thick with the taste of galley soft-serve, I’m sure. I found out recently that people my age don’t mark their childhood with the advent of the Department of Homeland Security, remembered recently that most people’s early movie-theatre experiences aren’t marked at the opening with the national anthem, a flag playing on the screen so you know where to face. This was comfort for me, this patriotic caution, yet even at five, unsettling.

Another banger of an opening to the decade, this one — nationalism and plague, infected with the second, safe from the first, though not preserved from an unhealthy dose of disillusionment. Sometimes I can’t help but long for the remembered simplicity of humvees glimpsed in the desert on TV, so far distant — simpler because it is a faint impression. The kevlar heaviness of what I felt would be a constant war, always over the horizon. But sputtering out. Left our toys, went home. I don’t have the knowledge to understand what could have been avoided, and what was inevitable from the get-go, broiling since the seventies. All I’m stuck with is a feeling of hulking, pathetic shittiness, the taste of a latrine.

How to reckon? How do you dig in the bones of generations? How do you live without old stories, ancestral mouths? What’s to be done in the ash? Notions of apocalypse: pre- post- during-

What does it mean, anyway, for everything to go like that? How much different from a single death, a single day, a single breath? Seems so easy to spin the cosmic telescope so far IN that a fart becomes calamitous, easy to spin so far OUT that we’re swallowed in the dark, like plankton in the deep, fossils in sand. One of these days, it’s all over.

Push it back, push it back, struggle on. Getting highly doubtful that I’ll see a time in my life where the world thrives again. I fear for the future, for my hypothetical children, for my friends, in the world that seems to be steered chiefly by an algorithmically selected collection of empathy-dead epicureans and solipsists.

I am because we are.

How deep do we dig until our humanity can come out again? Is it enough to play in the soil? The precious epidermis, rich with life in a way our keratinized outer shell is not? To get dirty, get filthy, get fucked in the dark — nothing but shadows and breath in silver moonshine, images of bodies shot on film, low speed, blurring until you have a mouthful of another mouth, speaking in tongues like the prophets of old — divine fuckery? Is that my church? Doubtful.

I am full of doubt as always, which conflicts with my convictions, which flicker by the minute. My only real certainty is that I’m going to die. Some comfort! Thought even that, I can’t prove from experience, and sometimes I wonder if I’ll just … continue. Improbable, but sometimes comforting, in the way that delusion is. I’ve never done this before, of course. I’ll never do this again. The simple mathematics of existence as I see it. Endlessly hoping to be endless. Anyone that suggests that escape into the infinite would be boring is getting punched in the throat. I’ll make do, but I don’t have to be happy about it. Oh well.

The desert. Wide and reaching. Pulls me outside of myself. Rock like an unmoving ocean, predictable and resistant. It’ll be there to catch you if you fall. The solitude has so far been so much less lonely than being six feet from someone I’ll know I”ll never know in full. This kind of loneliness has a preferable honesty. It does not tantalize. It tells it as it is, and it swims with the sun and wind — those ancient gods so often lost in the rush of … what?

Pornography, largely, at the moment. Swollen bodies squirming on the screen. LED fantasies, LED nightmares — which is which is a matter of perspective, or POV as the category bar would declare. I’ve pretty much squeezed the life out of the erotic. Everything digitally digested, spit out in tiles, a coital mosaic, its algorithms made similarly partial to the kind of bodies that grace our congress: thin and white. This kind of loneliness is a longing for human skin.

This kind, that kind, the loneliness of a two-hundred mile separation from home, while it moves on without you. Busy machines scraping asphalt over the meadows that welcomed me a decade ago. That’s the kind of thing that makes me long for armageddon, for the total dissolution of the state, architecture fading back into the warm soil, vines climbing our skeletal remains. The loneliness of time opening up behind and ahead of me, a gaping unknown. Like the desert.

I turn, day by day, more into a cactus. My body is tense. I’m hardly drinking any water. I become pricklier by the day. I don’t know that there’s an antidote for cactification. I doubt I’d take it if there was. Too suspicious of medicine, and suspicious that the coming years will be friendlier to the unfriendly, which is the austerity attitude, the prevailing post-9/11 sentiment, and I think, to play Freud for a minute, (oh ja!) is the same reason people cling to their over-convenient polymer penises of their AR-15s as though they’ll bring coal back to its glory days, unflood their homes, prevent crime, reinstate segregation, cure cancer, or fix their failing marriage — as though these are the kinds of things you can move with mere prickles. 

 Meanwhile, violence is wrought. Careless and pathetic.

Hence, the desert, where MRAPs are shipped around, too far armored for the kind of war we have in store. Lifesaving against hidden explosive devices, but rendered clumsy by their defensiveness — unable to cross bridges that can't manage their weight. They are shipped home, pressed into police service. One sat in the Sheriff’s Property Unit yard for a long time, looking like a white whale.

There is so much else to say.