From the low moving hills above the hollow shallows of ship graveyards, he played his guitar a little drunk and maybe well and crossed the street in the town he knew too long near the refinery and everything there was as fine as it was ever gonna get, long tall sally steeples and columns from no Greek age the ancients ever knew and the days dragged on even the dogs knew the one way streets and the times all the trains ran along the bright inviting red and yellow playyards of their only children, who all left and never came back because they didn't have the nerve to suggest the underground solution, or the junking of the naval graveyard because really as lovely as it was the unborn deformed things, they were there, underwater grew barnacles in the beautiful summer waves but kept the people from forming a more perfect union and somehow the riches just got pumped out altogether when they pumped out the oil it really was the energy in those fields, not just the money but the gravity of it too and even the birds didn't stay there much any more standing in the pools before they flew north to meet waves of joy tumbling from heaven where standard oil wasn't sucking at mother earth's tit and offering not even small pleasures as a reward, just the sunlight lighting the streets a little in between the metal fences,
maybe designed to keep something in a little -- not out, a hair shop,
a harvest, and tubes and pipes, and drums with nothing there in the
parking lots, I got lost, turned around and I could see how those that
stayed got that way too between the old green trees where it wasn't
mean, it just warn't nice neither.
The people who took my 2 dollars when I waited in line for an hour on the bridge, I figured they were worn out from the expectations of others, doing it in the road, expecting slavery and figuring out that waiting has no real reward but the end of waiting, and have you ever thought that something was the reverse of what you thought - which misalignment was the real truth the first one or the second or both or neither? Sandblasting your mind or the person in line or behind you with lights and insults or incense and the offering of a speedy 2 dollar get out of jail free it's on me? These are the questions which come up in California knowing all that dreadful beauty is just right there every where you look and I can't stand it somehow I want to store that gorgeousness and give it with love to everyone a treat, but its all normal heaven so when you are there you don't think about nearly freezing to death hitchhiking in Fairbanks out of boredom when the cold snapped to 30 below and then more and my knees started to freeze through solid and one of us ran thinking he could make it to a row of houses and come back with help and life giving heat before the loss was too much, fingers, toes, life, and we just barely made it a number of times, what with the drugs and darkness, old carpets and low ceilings and no light year after year, with the life expectancy of an idiot? what is that to looking on a beautiful scene in California the houses not there only the land, the blue sea, the cloud raked sky?
Maybe there is no difference between stumbling onto a buffalo or bear, or a drunk or murderous stalker waiting around the wrong corner you just never took, the unwalked path, the unknown loss of life or happiness standing at Christmas at Twin Peaks above the City sparkling, glowing like some fable from another time, really seriously now I'm telling you -- you need to know -- this place is that place now, the best the world has to offer at each bright moment, shinning and wet, happy people packed like best sardines from tablescape to landscape from bridge to ridge, boiled in hot tubs filled with sense pleasures like what they told us Romans did, and all great cultures did they not do it at someone else's expense, not like they wanted to pack that karma around like a dissected frog or the Mona Lisa, but because in some cases they just could and there was no one there to stop them and after all who stops me from doing stuff like not forgetting and forgiving or knowing when enough is enough, I'm not dumb but even sometimes I give it my best shot and it's just off, like shooting in the dark, I told you before about that, you standing there undecided, me tossing the wreath of fresh flowers and missing you, and I miss them too, picking fights and furious, wanting just to give that package with the million dollar day in it, can admission of sin be any cure or just like a cheap movie?
Sometimes alone walking in the absolute dark, stand for a while and look at the stars because that's what the eclipse allows you to see, all waste at no.
written 2000 in Folsom California,
a short story about Benicia, California