Shrike 

The War is on, the out-cry begun

posted by jeremy on July 24, 2003

I'm standing up & pedaling at full sprint alongside the wild mob of our protesting citizenry, downtown humming with shouts & sirens... & suddenly, (& here the drawbacks of being a cyborg present themselves) there is no tension in my drive train, my feet spinning round uselessly, fucking my balance & over I go. My right knee hits the pavement first & acts as an axis, whipping me around counter-clockwise, as gravity & speed slams the rest of my mass into the pavement & I can feel my flesh ripping in a dozen places.

"Bullshit motherfucker!" I scream so dumbly at that same gorgeous sky.

A disinterested cop looks on as approximately 347 people run over to see if I'm OK. I stagger to my feet & beg off from my would-be assistance as politely as possible. I check my wounds & mutter, with due vehemence, an ineloquent monologue, an improvised spew of invective that one can only truly create at the edge of catastrophe, be it large or small. You dumb-ass whore-son cunt-boy bike-motherfucker. Fucking horse-shit trip-up goddam gear-fucked fuck-off, I'll fucking destroy you, you crap-faced traitorous bitch... A lonely bus honks at me & I carry my fucking tory punk-ass zebra-sucking ill-begotten jack-off of a bastard machine over to the sidewalk where I research the origins of my stunningly painful humiliation... & the problem? The locking cap on my free-hub has come loose, thus allowing one of the cogs on my cassette to spin freely & thus...

The subsequent lack of necessary tension.

It's amazing how much the slightest details matter. (But hey, in the end, I'm mistaken. Technically, the cogs on my cassette shouldn't be able to spin independently of the hub, no matter how loose the locking cap is. What I don't know is that one of my cogs is cracked nearly in half, totally fucking destroyed. But I'm going to save that discovery for another day, another wreck, an even greater burst of invective.)

Anyway, here I am, in the now & I'm bleeding but fine.

I just need a tool I don't have.

I'm pushing my bike thru this crowd all agog with signs, puppets & chants & I'm sober with my own conflicting emotions. I'm trying to figure this out. I'm considering the history of us, the future of everything, the possibility of a paradigm shift in the populace of the United States & the possibilities, as ever, seem contingent on the wildly unstable variables of human behavior... like the fluttering of acidic moths thruout the rusting steel pylons of our traditions. All of these people, raging or laughing; The instability I smell in the slow broiling of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. Things are shifting, tectonic rumbles deep in the psyche of America...

& giants, malevolent & otherwise, awake.

What do you see? I'm asking myself, even as blood slips from a 3-inch gash in my side. I see so many facets, so many layers; An entire ecology of wheels within wheels. I see the beginnings of a slow balkanization process creeping stealthily thru the lattice of our nation's infrastructure. In this, I also see the hopeful if precarious birth of a Cascadia. I see the possible emergence of some kind of pseudo-theocracy in the blind acceptance, by the American populace, of Bush's Divine Mandates. Watching the cops in full riot gear standing guard outside of NikeTown & Starbucks, I see a semi-corporate semi-police state. I'm also suspecting the imminent arrival of a more obvious corporate police state. How long before police cars roar up bearing the logos of Disney & Coke & officers, their uniforms stitched with product placement, hop out & begin firing off instant-win rubber bullets or tear gas grenades at the (anti?) consumerist masses? I can only imagine... Bang! Boom! & then... Sorry, you are not a winner. Please try again.

Shit, several cash-strapped police departments have already taken the bait. I saw the article in the New York Times or was it Adbusters? Either way, some police departments are already selling advertisement space on their patrol cars. If there is a niche, the free ('free' as in cancer metastasizing?) market moves into it. But all of this bullshit is too easy, when one starts thinking about it. Trends in corp/ government determine themselves; Just follow the projected line of greed & power on the chart & there you are, it's never been a fucking mystery.

Whereas, it's the evolution of dissent that seems the most unpredictable variable.

Stupid & brilliant! This momentary carnival of what? 20,000 humans? Mostly peaceful, standing off against the insectile sheen of police, also human, tho of a different employ. Gorgeous fun, this living breathing pulsing chunk of modern anthropology for the amateur observer. This order vs chaos or is it the other way around? & I sit for a while, just staring at the cops, pushing the limits of my empathy: What do these armored apes say amongst themselves? What do they think? How do they cope, deep inside themselves, facing off against the citizenry? This is not an enviable job. It must be difficult for the softest of them. Staring at these dangerous dorks, as they stand around, looking valiantly stupid, bristling with weaponry, I am not outraged, so much as bemused. This is what police do, in our century, this is their function, to maintain order, no matter the cost & to uphold the law, be it the law of the Corporations and their lobbyist or the law of the People. Like a rock is solid or water, fluid... This is their nature. Why it continues to surprise people is beyond me. Individually, they are just overly exuberant predators in a race of predators. Ultimately, they are a just a symptom of our disease, not the disease itself.

At this moment, as if to puncuate my point, a chant goes up. Something about the power of the people & I can't really make sense of what they are trying to say. The power of which people? I thought they were here to protest the power of people or maybe I was mistaken. I don't get it & these people just keep chanting, marching in step, waving things at the sky, like groups of people always have. In this present, I see the past; I see a future I don't care for. Out of each revolution arises the S.O.S. Don't they know this? Power corrupts. Power abhors a vacuum & I'm waiting for an evolution, not a revolution. A good friend of mine once said, "We don't need a movement... We need a stillness." & I still believe him.

& I tell you, I believe in the personal, not the collective. I have no desire to belong to something greater than myself; No government, no religion, no army, no party, no activist cell or movement. I learned this early on, I keep it with me... I never belong.

So I don't join in, I just stand up & start walking, opposite to the crush of this horde.

The cops, revolutionaries, the paradigm of duality, the eternal enemies, thru all the ages... How this thought bores me, it's all so fucking familiar, the thought of each dehumanizing the other, each always seeking the hard-line, the point of no return. The truth of our potential freedom lies somewhere outside this cheap drama, I don't know where, just that it isn't here.

I'm watching some moron protest organizer shout orders at the crowd thru a bullhorn & once again, I'm remembering the words of that German anarcho, Gustav Landauer, 'The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; We destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.' & I'm wondering, how are we behaving differently? What is the future of our dissent? Is our disorganization the death... or the life... of us? Is pacifism pathological? Where exactly does the road of violence lead to? At which point do we become that against which we rage? How much are we already... that exact thing... which we despise?

I can articulate scarcely a scrap of what I feel, what I think, what I believe. Looking out at all of this confused desire & hope & anger, I see something just born, something vibrant & alive, something staggering & retching in sickness, something on the edge of darkness & death. I see something I hate... & love. I don't know what to do with it. I don't think any of us do.

But we are going to have to figure it out.

The bike shop swells up before me & I push inside, limping with my tweaked machine. I slap the bell on the mechanic's counter & as I wait, momentarily distracted by the multi-thousand dollar fine-ass road bikes, I think of what it is that I desire from this undeniably psychotic yet somehow lovely race of mine. What is it? What do I ask? As if this wish would be granted at my decision but still... What? & now the mechanic comes out of the back room & simply stops, suddenly, as shocked as I am, I think... & then she smiles, showing such sharp white teeth.

"Howdy." she says, just a whisper & I can see now that her eyes are blue.

Her eyes are blue.

I first glimpsed her thru the rain in a park we call Forest.

I had woken up that morning craving chlorophyll & dirt, the smell of detritus, a certain kind of silence. I crawled from bed, washed my ugly face, brushed my smoke-stained teeth, pulled on jeans, shirt, sweater, boots, stuffed journal & book (Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear, if you want to know) into my ragged yet rugged orange pack & walked to Stumptown for coffee.

Reading the paper, its science-fiction by-lines, headlines, advertisement manipulations.... American military drones used for assassination of Al Qaeda members, kittens cloned, human genome unscrambled, buy buy buy a laptop NOW... only solidified my need for mud & leaf.

I finished my dark brew & got going.

I walked the long walk, thinking of nothing important, to the Max line where I considered not paying my fare, where I considered the stupid $250 ticket & decidedly paid my $1.15.

Better pragmatically safe, I suppose, than idealistically stupid.

I hate riding in automobiles, hate flying even more but trains soothe me, move me in more ways than one. The Max shot along thru downtown & into the hills, under the hills, picking up fast, clackety-clack, nothing like the BART in San Fran but quick enough to get you there. Gently brought to a stop at the only underground station in Portland, I stepped off in time to see a flash of red in the elevator 50 yards away... & then the bright steel doors slid shut.

The arboretum at Washington Park has its subtle charms. Redwoods, Sequoia, Port Orford, Jerusalem & Deodar cedar, a few Madrones, some nice stands of bamboo & the inevitable creep of English Ivy. I remember stopping to stare at the last of the neon-yellow needles on a deciduous Dawn Redwood. Thought extinct for several million years, these trees were found doing just fine in some obscure valley in China back in the '40s.

What a brilliant re-emergence, I remember thinking.

I worked my way up to the Mansion, its heavy extravagance hewn of mineral & timber sales, the blood of Oregon's history, now a tourist spot, a historic reminder, but of what? Money wins? Buy now, pay later? The Parks & Recreation people haven't decided quite what yet.

I sat there for a while as the rain came & went, listening to the splatter of water vs stone, knowing that water will always eventually win, looking out at the dark clouds that hid the mountains, occasionally scribbling ridiculous pseudo-haikus into my notebook, & eventually...

Tiny insignificant microbe;

Yet even the small

must shit.

The coffee & hiking taking their toll, I sought out the nearest receptacle, a porta-potty, Honey Bucket! said the side of it & taking my time, reading my long book, I took care of business, dropped some kids off at the pool, as my friend would have said...

& then I stepped back out into the mist.

& here I have to tell you something & it may sound silly but it's true.

Sometimes there are miniscule moments when the entire world, the entire universe, every possible arrangement of all possible universes... All of it collapses completely, the entire program goes down & nobody notices except one maybe two creatures, before Whatever-Beast-Be-God catches the error & does its magic, does what it gets paid in blood to do & gets the whole system up & running again. This, I felt, was one of those moments.

Because something hit me.

No, something bitch-smacked the fuck out of me.

Sitting in the exact spot where I had been sitting, under a scant overhang where the moss & lichen grow thick, where the rain doesn't quite touch you but still gets in your lungs, sat a wraith. A lithe wraith. A gorgeous wraith cloaked in a red fleece. I could see this wraith's profile, blond rough cut hair poking from beneath a bright blue baseball cap, her pack sitting next to her, her long legs drawn up to her chest, staring out over the city, as I had.

A wraith that struck me, bitch-slapped me, collapsed my multi-verse.

Something, someone, so fucking bright against this grey wet world.

& so I watched her... I watched her just long enough for her to notice me, to level her unreadable eyes my way, eyes whose color I couldn't make out, two perfect wraith-ish eyes.

& then I walked, stupidly, quickly, happily away.

Three days later, at the Goodwill Bins on McLoughlin, thrusting my hands into piles of clothing infested with satan-knows-what, hoping to find a good solid jacket, hoping not to prick myself on some sharp object covered with bacterium hardened in the environment of that place, I glanced up & again, she was there... Two aisles away & wearing old jeans, a faded t-shirt, some ridiculous puffy vest, her dirty blond hair outlining her face. She was very pale, her semi-translucent skin, the slight dark shadows under her tired eyes.

She was simply, devastatingly, beautiful.

She looked up just then & saw me & I startled, not outwardly but deep inside, my imaginary soul jumped, like a startled fish in the salt-water of my pale skin. We were looking right at each other & there was no air between us, just a warm clear vacuum & in that absence, she smiled, just ever so slightly & I smiled back & then she turned around & began sorting thru a different bin of mysterious & somehow, suddenly, wonderfully filthy clothing. At which point I realized what I was holding in my hands, a nasty pink negligee, circa-1966...

& I am but a gibbering idiot amongst slavering fools.

I was lost in some kind of hormonal fog for the rest of the day, confused & stuttering. Occasionally, the thought of her would run from the shadows like a pit-bull & begin violently chewing at the already ragged pants-leg of my consciousness & there was nothing I could do...

Again.

I was standing on the corner of 28th & Burnside, poised, like a human Frogger, to slip across the irritating stream of five o'clock traffic. I was going to the Hungry Tiger to meet some friends, drink some well liquor, shoot some pool, maybe play some old Rolling Stones on the jukebox. The bus roared by, slowing for the bus stop & I looked up, fairly innocently... & it was a bright day, fairly warm, still with that consistent threat of rain, the uncertain disposition that is the NW temperament. Clouds rippling over & I could see the sky reflected in the windows of that bus but thru the glare... It was her again.

I saw her dim outline & she, mine... Sharper I suppose, in all that light, still just a millisecond of visual contact & then she was gone & I was left with only the smell of burnt diesel...

& that fucking pit-bull, bow wow wow.

& again.

I was downtown, rooting thru the library for a decent book, passing easily enough thru all those volumes of our accumulated knowledge, all of that tragedy, that tragic comedy, all of those Stephen King novels. Me with a cup of coffee in my hand, (not Starfucks, for the record) trying, with great intent, to escape my hangover & who should I see, with her dirty hair & tired eyes, sitting at a Net terminal with such casual grace, but her... My wraith.

I immediately fled upstairs, somehow scared & pursued, bow o shit o wow.

& again, one week later, at a crowded math-metal concert in some sweating basement. We both kept on, drinking & laughing, each ignoring the other. A few days after that, I saw her while shopping at the Fred Meyers on Interstate. I simply bought some produce.

I kept seeing her, again & again & again.

But the weeks, those bastards, passed in their indeterminate chaotic way, months slipping easily by, small rocks spun off into the big pond, bright splashes full of poignant mundanity & finally, I finally began to not see her. She had apparently gone back to that from which she had emerged, whatever mysterious life she led, whatever line of existence she followed, alpha to omega, our paths ceased to cross & so I forgot about her, I even forgot that I'd forgotten her.

& my life was filled with simply that... the Business of Life. I read, wrote, worked, payed bills, drank, ate, pissed, shat & laughed, tho I did not cry. My life kept on, unpunctuated...

Until one wild tearing day, the war begun, the sat-guided bombs built of our taxes, the subsequent protest by a minority bursting with the thought that we should not be in the business of Empire, a minority valiant, confused, bright, dim, weak & powerful... where, wrapped in that gathering of thousands, I managed to wreck my bike fucking again & needing repairs, filled with the unanswerable questions of my immediate environment, I made my way to the nearest bike shop &...

I push inside, limping with my tweaked machine. I slap the bell on the mechanic's counter & as I wait, momentarily distracted by the multi-thousand dollar fine-ass road bikes, I think of what it is that I desire from this undeniably psychotic yet somehow lovely race of mine. What is it? What do I ask? As if this wish would be granted at my decision but still... What? & now the mechanic comes out of the back room & simply stops, suddenly, as shocked as I am, I think... & then she smiles, showing such sharp white teeth."Howdy." she says, just a whisper & I can see now that her eyes are blue.

Her eyes are blue.

Addendum to Stupid Bullshit...

So listen to me, listen, just another moment. Here I am, I tell you this story, I tell you the news of my life thru means of this 'zine, but that does not mean that I forget the context of this world, I do not forget the unforgivingly stark & starkly unforgiving nature of all it is that happens. I tell you my ridiculous little tale but as all of this went down, as miraculous as I may find it to be, I remember the background noise & I know that that noise is insidiously hideously real...

Like I said, it's amazing how our lives just go on.

The news of the world's degradation tumbled about like acid snow, but life in PDX, on a one-to-one basis, continued as ever. I ate dinner & drank fine beer with friends even as the rough beast of our government pounded Iraq into the ancient dust of Mesopotamia in (concisely oil-driven) retribution, despite the facts, for 9/11. I slopped coffee & scratched symbols into my notebook, even as life capitulated to death... over there? Lo, all over this tiny planet, thru the passage of large bullets or slight shrapnel, the divine patterns of cluster bombs, the unlucky triggering of some explosive mine or another, it all went on & on & on. Miracles & horror, distant & near & there we were, all of us, undeniably swaddled in the warm everyday.

All I had to worry about was the love of a girl, the making of my rent.

Still, goddam, all I can say: I'm so sorry, all you war-torn, so sorry, better luck next life... But here is the bitch, here is the motherfucker, as far as we know, there are no other lives. Just this one shot & I'm so sorry.

I'm so very sorry.