my winter song

I feel a cold coming on.

What is it about winter that makes people even more impersonal than they already are? Walking down the street is like being in a zombie movie. Passersby stare to the ground and ignore the noisy, chilling world around them. We are afraid to look one another in the face, and even when we do it seems to be from malice and not friendship.

If I successfully smile at one person, and receive that smile back, my day will have been brighter for it. Instead we trudge along, only shocked by the honking of cars or pounding of jackhammers. Even those things don’t seem to hold our attention.

The sky is gray and it makes me gloomy. For no particular reason other than it feels good to be gloomy. It feels good to pretend like the world is on my shoulders, and that the sight of me would raise the greatest empathy in a person. Give me your pity, dark world, for you did this. You made me enjoy this despondency I feel.

Why else would dogs, who live in our houses and on our sidewalks, choose to run free in the park if given the choice? Their nature is exactly that: Nature. They eat the grass and roll in the dirt and shit on the flowers. They don’t shit on the concrete. They find the square of land that has been broken from the concrete and they shit there. And then they eat the grass that grows from it.

I hit a possum on the way to the airport today. I thought it was a suitcase until I saw its face twisting in pain from the previous car’s infliction, only for the split second before I rolled over it in it my steel killing machine. I felt its head hit the undercarriage, and could only hope that was its last moment of consciousness. I will dream about that tonight. (I dreamt about he apocolypse).

I parked in the cell phone lot and waited, dog in the backseat. I grabbed her for a quick stroll, and we found the saddest patch of dirt ever to grace the Earth’s surface. It was soft and full of weeds, and I realized that someone had actually landscaped it recently with fresh woodchips. I mean, why bother? The dog enjoyed the forgiving ground, sure, and shit on it of course. But who are we kidding by keeping two sad trees and some shrubs alive by a busy polluted freeway to a busier, more polluted airport. Run over the poor things, already, put them out of their misery.

A plane flew overhead at an arms reach, its deafening roar allowing pause. “These poor trees,” I thought, ears ringing. Out of fear the dog took off for the road, thankfully constrained by her leash, and we ran back to my car and cowered in its homicidal body, waiting for the phone to ring.

Do No Harm

I was descending one of the great Fairfax hills this morning and noticed a woman a couple blocks in front of me standing in the street. As a approached, I realized she wasn't flagging down the mail truck but jerkedly weeping. She was a little girl in a grown woman's body, with confused and blurry eyes, spasming with fits of tears.

I neared to see that she was staring at a lump in the road - an animal, possibly her cat - that lay in a sorry state. It was a squirrel, whose leg twitched in writhing agony as I passed, and all the emotion coming from this woman lept forcibly into my body. She glanced up at me for a moment with a look of desperation, telling me with her eyes that it was up to me to do something.

So I backed up and swerved the two tons of steel over the tortured, miserable state of squirrel. It wasn't your typical Disney scene with happy deer and rodents singing in the forest as I felt the body crush beneath my 5-speed killing machine. The woman had stopped crying and hiccuped into a disbelieved silence. I rolled down my window, looked the woman in her tear-worn eyes, and said, "Your welcome."

Ok, so the second part of that didn't actually happen, but I played a version of its scenario on repeat behind my eyes all day. On my way back that night the squirrel, and consequently the woman, were both gone, but the haunting memory remains and forever burned cortex of my mind. I will always wonder, should I have just put it out of its misery?

The Beast of Fertile Plains

We lay down on a small patch of perfectly manicured grass outside a casino. I don’t recall which one, they all blended in to one loud, amnesiac nightmare after a time. “You guys from San Francisco?” A man calls to us from beyond the lawn border. He is wearing a security guard uniform and straddling his mountain bike. We affirmed his guess. I suppose us Northern California types can’t remain in walls of fabricated dreamscapes for too long without losing our sanity. We started to question why exactly we had come.

You can’t cross the busy Las Vegas Boulevard on foot. A taxi could take 20 good minutes between stoplights a block apart. We watched the Bellagio fountain show from the car windows, not quite as spectacular as I’d remembered. Then again, nothing was the same as I remembered.

A couple street musicians were the only saving grace of the concrete overpasses; reflective windows echoed perfume ads in LED lights shining bright as day in the cold, dark desert night; People filmed without permission, and answered no questions.

Old ladies sucked down cigarettes whilst sticking in single dollars to another ambiguous slot machine. They chewed on their cheeks and occasionally sipped a fizzy coctail, eyes fixed on the seducing glow of the game. This sort of thing is to be expected, as sad a sight as it was. A bingo room is a good place to start if you are feeling really down on life. Watching wrinkled sweater-wearing geriatrics with folds over their eyes vigorously stamp a bingo card like an Adderrol prescribed child will make just about anyone realize that rock bottom has a new meaning. It will make you turn your life around immediately.

Sleazebags lurked in dark corners awaiting a heavy pocket or a vulnerable damsel. “Freebies” we were labeled by weathered Vegas prostitutes. I suppose it is to help justify the decisions they have made in their life as to why they didn’t opt for the more traditional life path. They enjoy what they do, even if some are too afraid to admit it. This too is to be expected of Vegas.

Guidos and chotskis, overbulked shoulders and necks supporting seemingly smaller heads. Vegas wins douchiest place on the planet 15 years in a row now, as if there were a douchbag convention every weekend offering free room and booze and too ensure their huffing and puffing up and down the strip. Unlike San Francisco, women are the outnumbered species having their picks of the litter; Unfortunately the mother dog drank cyanide and the three-eyed, two-legged father had a sperm flow blaringly inadequate with the collective IQ of a water bottle. The litter is unadoptable.

Everything that the United States has built upon its foundation of freedom and truth resides in a self-proclaimed successful capitalist state. For better or worse, it functions like a constantly-evolving wheel requiring systematic upkeep. Las Vegas literally means the fertile plains, a defined canvas made to reap what you sew with the proper attention. The seediest and most corrupted aspects of the wheel have planted themselves in some brine on the procreant desert floor in southern Nevada. Fifteen years later, the flower has proliferated into a desire-fulfilling, vice-supporting and soul-consuming human fly trap, one that requires huge costly inputs.

It hasn’t been doing so well no that the economy is on downturn. Maybe people realize is that Las Vegas is the devil of excess, only feeding a few lucky fatcats, and draining the rest of us of our ability to remember what it meant to lay on the grass and watch the stars.

Macondo oil well given the plug; Inhabitants in the town of the same name irate

In the viscous wake of said “worst” environmental disaster in the United States, guilty yet valuable resource Macondo oil well has been tried and convicted by the American justice system. Because of the nature of an oil well, a life sentence in San Quentin penitentiary was put on hold for Macondo to find a more reasonable punishment. Scientist have devised a plug to put over the gaping hole in the sea bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, much like a cork you would place over an exploding bottle of champagne. This champagne, quite similar to the kind you find in sexy bottles during the holidays, left equal amounts of intoxication, anger, resentment and confusion.

The disaster, without saying, has left a bad taste in the world’s mouth. Especially for the fictional town of Macondo, whose name has been saturated with the dirty smear campaign of environmentalists, fishermen and Californians. Macondo, made famous by Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, hopes to clean up the rumors that they had anything to do with the bad news.

“It’s not fair that some negligent management on an oil rig has caused us such infamy to Macondo. BP is located in London and the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. We only exist in the hearts and minds of Marquez’s readers,” said Macondo mayor and town founder José Arcadio Buendía. “People should really get their facts straight.”

Since the accident, tourism to the area has plummeted. Regular visitors like gypsies, the gringo, ghosts and even hurricanes have neglected to make their appearance after the announcement that 11 workers were killed and 200 million gallons of oil were spilled into the Gulf. As of now, scientists have found no connection to the fictional town and the BP-owned oil well.

Only a half a year after the spill, interest in the disaster has declined dramatically. Media outlets have found they acquire more web hits when reporting on Tea Party activity and the whereabouts of Natalie Portman than on the spill’s aftermath. When negative words like “kill” and “disaster” were once used to describe the event, “investors” and “profits” now replace them. BP is headed back to its seat on the pedestal of profit, and the town of Macondo is believed to follow. Most are expecting the events, like the dense petroleum in the gulf, to wash over in a couple months.

Never give up

Do you ever sit - after absorbing more negative news reports about political fraud and corruption than your spongy form can handle - and wonder if the system is a reparable one? Does the scratching of backs and filling of pockets seem so rooted in our everyday lives that to fix one thing would mean to chop down the whole tree? Were we meant to remain in a discontented state so as to keep working, keep striving for a better tomorrow? And if we were to reach this hypothetical utopia, what then?

Alan Watts says, "we could have no poor without the rich, no good without the bad. One could simply not exist without the other. " So to be content is to accept that these "bad" things just are, even if they aren't just. But reading that the CEO has been lying to the shareholders who have earned false profits from the broker who once advised the politician whom I voted for, I find myself had, confused and penniless.

Young energetic educated somethings scream at the thick white walls that represent liberty and freedom but only seem to produce disappointment. They yell that its their world now, and this system that was administered to them year after year from text books doesn't seem to work as well as their teachers told them it should.

What is the purpose, then, to have lied to us all along, just so we can find out certain truths that make us wonder if we can opt out of the whole damn thing? Sure, the eye of the pyramid benefits from the ignorance of the masses, but are humans disposed to our own self-annihilation? The faults of this system will certainly be its own downfall, and I it strains me to figure out if we are most certainly doomed not to fix it.

To be successful in this modern world, it is more beneficial to learn something like advertising or political science than to dive into the fine arts, music or literature. It is the art of manipulation that is master, and even if we know this we fall victim.

Once I removed myself from a world of made up numbers and colorful pictures and bright shiny objects I found myself at ease... and quite bored. As if my DNA has been altered by the technological imperatives, over-consumption, TV screen-over-the-eyes state of the union, I couldn't imagine my life without distraction. Give me a lobotomy and pump me with Adderall, doc, for I won't survive the unplug. Maybe I'll just start drinking.

In no way am I proposing the white flag of surrender. Our society is only interesting when the anarchists strike the corporation, when the donkeys fight the elephants, when David walks up to Goliath in a new understanding of his existence and says, "Fuck you, Giant." Lest forgetting the perversion of truth in our present world, I'd like to root everyone on. Keep it up and enjoy the ride, because there is no life without the chance of death.