339 lines
23 KiB
Plaintext
339 lines
23 KiB
Plaintext
GwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwD
|
|
T h e G R E E N Y w o r l d D o m i n a t i o n T a s k F o r c e ,
|
|
I n c o r p o r a t e d
|
|
Presents:
|
|
__ __ 77777777777 11
|
|
_____ ____ _| |__| |_ 777 111
|
|
// | \ |_ __ _| 777 1111
|
|
|| ____ | || | | | | | 777 111
|
|
|| || \ / | || | _| |__| |_ 777 111
|
|
\\___// \/\/ |____/ |_ __ _| 777 111
|
|
|__| |__| 777 111
|
|
777 11111
|
|
|
|
"The Ride" by Franken Gibe
|
|
|
|
----- GwD: The American Dream with a Twist -- of Lime ***** Issue #71 -----
|
|
----- release date: 11-25-99 ***** ISSN 1523-1585 -----
|
|
|
|
Riding on a sheet of afternoon glare. it's over a hundred, i feel pricks of
|
|
cold sweat on my chest, under my arms - where it's dark and moist and smells
|
|
sharp, pungent and profane, where glossy black hairs coil like a bed of asps, or
|
|
twin cunts. i feel dizzy and sick, and probably need to pull over, spew what's
|
|
left of the coke slurpee and sack of pretzels that's been rotting in my stomach
|
|
for an hour. god it's hot. i imagine the hell under the hood, the four
|
|
cylinders coughing and choking on each fiery wheeze of the carburetor, i think
|
|
the CO is messing my mind. i keep seeing someone sitting next to me. it's
|
|
after 4pm. i've gotta drive till the sun dies, probably drive through the hot,
|
|
dry black of the desert night, i'll look out into the night, and i'll wonder
|
|
what the lights are that i pass, way out in the desert, what's out there, alone,
|
|
little islands of daytime, like sunlight from the afternoon stranded, caught in
|
|
some eddy.
|
|
|
|
97 degrees, 8:30pm or so. i'm roaming the streets of Yuma, cuz i can't bear to
|
|
sit in the motel watching some showtime movie with kevin bacon who gets bitten
|
|
by a radioactive snake near alamagordo. i drove by alamagordo three days ago.
|
|
i went to the sand dunes out there, an ocean of glare, and started taking off my
|
|
clothes. it was almost a reflex. i'm alone, sliding down pure white sand dunes
|
|
and roasting, disoriented, i can't see my car, it's behind that big dune, i
|
|
hope. i try to video tape, but the camera can't deal with the glare, it stops
|
|
way the fuck down and the images just look like sand, like a big absurd sandbox
|
|
with me, half-naked, sputtering something about 'water...water,' and falling
|
|
down. i still have sand caught in my ass. but that was nothing like it was.
|
|
cuz you look out, and the dunes are unbearably bright. it's like the sun's been
|
|
atomized, and a billion billion grains of sunlight are scattered around, all of
|
|
'em blowing up in micro-novas. sunglasses don't help. squinting doesn't help.
|
|
you fall down. you take off your clothes. everything is overexposed. you feel
|
|
like you're fading. maybe that's why i stripped. the overexposure is
|
|
intoxicating. you wanna fade to white, like some jesus in one of those old
|
|
bible movies, you wanna be light, you wanna be a nova, explode without a sound,
|
|
sweat away your nasty little smelly sunburnt body and explode, a soundless
|
|
immense wonderful glare that you can't really see, you either close your eyes
|
|
and see red, or you open your eyes wide and fall down.
|
|
|
|
8:34pm. i'm sitting in this parking lot in Yuma, Arizona, getting off on some
|
|
neon lights that're flashing at a liquor store. i think they're supposed to
|
|
look like a satellite. i get a kick out of that old fifties futurism: the
|
|
asteroid motel; ground zero burgers; sputnik wine and spirits. people came out
|
|
west back then, and probably thought they'd left earth. there's some kid
|
|
sitting in my front seat with me. he was skating around the parking lot. he
|
|
said he's been in yuma all his life. he just got off work at the mcdonald's. i
|
|
tell him i'm just driving. he says he'll help with the gas money. the neon
|
|
light satellite looks like it's spinning on its axis, its a red and blue blur.
|
|
in the hot dry breath of this arizona night, i realize i'm lost.
|
|
|
|
Every interstate has a number, and the even numbers go east and west, the odd
|
|
numbers go north and south. each number appears on a little shield, and when
|
|
you drive on the interstates you drive behind that shield. you can't see shit,
|
|
except oncoming traffic. you never have to ride through a town, or stop for a
|
|
light. if you had enough gas, you really could drive behind that shield
|
|
forever, till you got hungry or old or lonely. you could mark time not by the
|
|
change of seasons but of car models. your philosophy would be the surface of
|
|
the road and its unending cycle of decay and repair. your life would cease to
|
|
be a matter of months and years, but of miles per hour. there're plenty of
|
|
signs, you can't get lost on an interstate, there's hardly any confusion. i
|
|
stay off of them as much as i can.
|
|
|
|
My friend doesn't say much. he watches the road blur out the side window. it
|
|
hypnotizes him into silence. there's not much to say, cruising along the
|
|
blacktop at 75. the windows are open, and the wind cuts through the car like a
|
|
wide-open jet engine. any silence that isn't mangled by the wind is taken care
|
|
of by the radio, playing at full throttle. sometimes i hear guitar feedback
|
|
beneath the roar. driving through the desert in the mid-afternoon with the
|
|
windows down, no a/c and just a half-bottle of warm, stale water is wonderfully
|
|
absurd. i blast down the highway, half-blind, half-delirious, half-asleep.
|
|
it's the kind of drive that paralyzes your senses. tears are ripped out of my
|
|
eyes by the wind and dust. the wind deafens me. the heat leaves me in a pool
|
|
of cold sweat; numb, muscles hang like hot rubber. the car spins forward crazy
|
|
and loud, i can't say i'm really in control. it's now that driving becomes
|
|
unconscious, a trip, a rush. speed is the drug, and it drags you along, limp
|
|
and sorta crazy. and as long as you're awake, and as long as you can hold the
|
|
wheel, you're the pilot of this trip, and there's a four-valve in your chest and
|
|
radials strapped on your ankles. out the windshield the dream flies by, the
|
|
joshua trees and the yellow lines and the sun in its hot arch, what a trip, what
|
|
a fucken high, wide-awake dreaming at 75 mph in the hot, bald sun on the
|
|
mirror-glare of the desert road. "let's get a drink, let's stop, ok?" so my
|
|
friend's awake. wakes me up, too. "next town."
|
|
|
|
I told him about my fall. i was skating at midnight, january wind was cutting
|
|
into my face, made my ears hurt. i hit hard, and felt dizzy the rest of the
|
|
month. i told him how i'd stand in that cement ditch near Sam's Wholesale and
|
|
just stare. it'd be an out-of-body experience, i'd see myself standing and
|
|
staring in the ditch, there i am, down below, and suddenly i'm so high, and i
|
|
see the cement ditch, and the cement runways into the ditch, the whole ditch
|
|
network, the canals from the interstate, the floodways near the lake, the
|
|
thousand thousand gutters stretching down all those suburban streets. i saw the
|
|
pipes, the underground zig-zag of pvc and lead and concrete. i could see the
|
|
land below stretched out like some immense integrated circuit. i saw the
|
|
connections, the interconnections, all white cement and asphalt and bermuda
|
|
grass, broken Bud bottles and Big Mac boxes burst into a billion styro-bits. i
|
|
tried to tell him how i felt, riding the banked concrete, surfing cement, the
|
|
Built Environment. it's such a trip, y'know, riding a ditch. it's a
|
|
revelation, it gives meaning to all the cement, the empty parking lots, all the
|
|
concrete and asphalt men pour onto the earth. when i ride the cement, the
|
|
material world suddenly seems a lot less lonely, and i feel a lot less
|
|
alienated. i wanted to say that's why i loved him, why i picked him up. he
|
|
asked me about skate tricks. i didn't have much to say on the subject, so we
|
|
ate our burritos in silence.
|
|
|
|
i'm not convinced that san francisco isn't a mirage, a ghost city that rolls in
|
|
with the bay fog in the morning, and fades away with the thick, grey fog in the
|
|
late afternoon. sometimes, driving across the bridge from berkeley, the city
|
|
seems to be projected on the cloud banks by a magic lamp. in the desert,
|
|
dematerialization is a matter of over-exposure. in the city, it's a matter of
|
|
absorption. the bay's dragon breath overtakes the city, engulfs it, absorbs it.
|
|
sometimes, the city can stay absorbed for days and days, and it's easy to
|
|
believe that it was only ever a delusion, so you walk the foggy streets and your
|
|
head rings with the sound of cable car bells.
|
|
|
|
My friend wanted to skate down by the customs house, there's a big plaza there.
|
|
i watched him ride, i watched the maybe 20 other skaters ride, like a cloud of
|
|
subatomics, bouncing off the pavement, the planters, the big cement fountain,
|
|
each other. behind me, they were ripping down the Embarcadero, that part of
|
|
san francisco's unending labyrinth of freeways that had itself been bounced
|
|
around by the Not So Big One. machines with teeth ate away at the two-story
|
|
road like parasites, gnawing away enormous slabs of cement. the road stretched
|
|
out along the bay like the concrete corpse of a sea dragon, maybe one of the
|
|
dragon's with the foggy breath. the road lay like carrion, and stank of hot
|
|
asphalt and rust. the big machines moved in to digest and decompose. a huge
|
|
iron ball swung back and forth, like a big pendulum, like a tidy metaphor for
|
|
time and time's crazy rapaciousness, the big ball slammed blindly into a
|
|
concrete support beam, each impact marked by a sonic boom, until the concrete
|
|
bone began to crumble, exposing twisted steel reinforcement rods like bent and
|
|
rusted nerves, or petrified veins. finally another segment of the road-corpse's
|
|
steel and cement endoskeleton rumbled and crumbled into a pile of debris that
|
|
exhaled a weird yellow-brown cloud of dust, and people stood around and clapped,
|
|
and even the skaters stopped their incessant grinding and hopping and carving
|
|
for maybe a second, and copped a look.
|
|
|
|
"Sometimes i'm lonely when you're not in the car," i told him foolishly, though
|
|
it didn't feel foolish, just sorta sad. "sometimes i'm lonely when i'm in the
|
|
car with you," he laughed, we laughed. i decided i had secrets, and should keep
|
|
them to myself, like i always have done, like i always felt compelled to do.
|
|
|
|
I wanted to tell him why i often get choked up looking at maps, how i love to
|
|
look at the map of the U.S., the familiar outlines of states, how i fill in the
|
|
empty outlines with my memories, the weird reconstruction era shacks down in
|
|
mississippi, the big long long roads in west texas, new mexico scrub, those
|
|
dunes in arizona. the map is my emotional compass, it's the big picture that
|
|
makes sense out of the miles and miles of homogeneity. i'm having troubles with
|
|
this. okay, it's like this, you drive into some town at night, in texas, or
|
|
nevada, maybe even somewhere out east like north carolina, maybe you get there
|
|
by the interstate, and that's when it's worst. blue neon blockbuster vid.
|
|
stores. and, 'course, all the fucken fast food places, and everything is so
|
|
fucken familiar, too familiar, too similar to everywhere else. that's when the
|
|
vertigo hits, this nauseating post-conscious deja vu...yeah, i've seen it all
|
|
before, i'll see it all again. it's bad at night cuz at night all you see are
|
|
the signs, and you look through the windshield and you don't see towns, but
|
|
commercials, advertisements, you see jingles. i feel better when i look at the
|
|
map, when i can categorize the territory, and assure myself that, yes, i am
|
|
somewhere else, i'm in The South, i'm going West, whatever. sometimes i have
|
|
bad dreams, though: i'm driving the interstates, and all there are are rest
|
|
stops, and they're all the same, and i look out, and all i see are cars,
|
|
millions of cars, driving the blank verse of the freeways, and all along the way
|
|
are the strip malls and fast food places. my friend thinks it's maybe a
|
|
conspiracy, and anyone who can't deal with the homogenization of the country
|
|
will have to run away, all the perverts, the misfits, everyone who can't be
|
|
Pasteurized, or Sani-Sealed. i'm pretty depressed by now, and i picture myself,
|
|
old, hearing aids wired through my cranium, sitting with a styro-cup of coffee
|
|
in some midnight fast food joint, staring at a little crumpled piece of paper,
|
|
a map of the u.s, probably dribbling snot and tears till the ink runs, and the
|
|
map just fades.
|
|
|
|
Haight st. made me crazy. we went there every morning we were in the city, cuz
|
|
i knew this girl who worked at a painfully hip cafe place on south haight and
|
|
she'd give us free coffee. haight st. is like one of the holy places of hip, a
|
|
mecca or medina for the post-grad., post-suburban beats and punks and rads.
|
|
sometimes i'll look at The Map, and i'll imagine little stars, like the stars
|
|
used to indicate state capitals, 'cept these stars are next to Really Cool
|
|
Places in america. capitals of cool, and haight st. was one of these, and as
|
|
annoying as it shoulda been, washed out, contradictory, commodified, scary and
|
|
stupid. white kids in cafes and black kids pushing. i can't think of the place
|
|
we'd go to, but it was like a texmex place, and they had pretty good coffee and
|
|
did tasty things to eggs and charged too much. i knew i didn't wanna grow up to
|
|
be hip, but i was confused, cuz what was i gonna do? in the desert, High
|
|
Speed's trash compactor squashes the past and the future into the present, balls
|
|
up the moment...so that the moment takes over, and you know the answer - drive,
|
|
just drive. but then you sit on your ass on haight, and the moment shrinks like
|
|
a spent erection, it gets reduced to coffee grounds, and the past and the future
|
|
creep out of dark corners, they're etched in the waiter's scowl, or in the
|
|
rhythm of the street walkers, roaming haight like wolves, ready to pounce on the
|
|
weak and uncertain.
|
|
|
|
The fog was rolling over the city's skyscrapers, through its alleys, its cracks
|
|
and crevices, like a bad horror flick, and we were on the road, south, maybe
|
|
west, i think it mattered even less at the time. he started talking crazy, i
|
|
thought maybe he'd dropped a tab, cuz he was talking a lot. he said he really
|
|
liked taking shits, or pissing while in motion, while on a plane, for instance,
|
|
or a train, or in on a bus, when you're half-choked by that nauseous sweet pink
|
|
smelling deodorizer. he said he liked to imagine what it'd be like if you
|
|
peeled away the plane's skin, all of it, then you'd see yourself maybe
|
|
30,000ft. in the air, zipping along at 500mph, all crouched up and dropping
|
|
fecal ordnance on the patchwork quilt america way down below. or, you know, if
|
|
the greyhound disappeared, but by inertia you just kept moving, suspended maybe
|
|
5 ft. above the interstate taking a whiz, and truckers would honk their airhorns
|
|
and other people would honk and blink their headlights and your piss stream
|
|
would stretch out for yards and yards. i thought this all sounded familiar,
|
|
like some existential version of Kant, cuz, you know, you could imagine yourself
|
|
doing all sorts of things, and then imagine what you'd look like doing them if
|
|
the world just sorta vanished, and there you are, in the spotlight of some
|
|
enormous void, jacking off, or making jello, or picking filth out of your
|
|
toenails, or drinking a slurpee, and man, i can't think of many things, short of
|
|
wiping some aids victim's sores, that wouldn't seem completely absurd. it's
|
|
like, even an exemplary act, even an act that could become a universal law seems
|
|
pointless and petty or just weird and sorta haunted when you project it on the
|
|
void, when you peel back the exoskeleton. everything we do seems as stupid and
|
|
surreal as some kid soaring through the stratosphere, crouched over, taking a
|
|
dump.
|
|
|
|
Near gallup, new mexico, he wanted to stop, so we stopped, and the day was
|
|
fading, and i could feel the hot highbeam of the setting sun on the back of my
|
|
neck, the orange sun, angry and sore. "what a rip-off," i said, glancing in my
|
|
rearview to see if the sunset was safe yet, if i could stare at it yet and not
|
|
go blind. "what?" he wondered, and i pointed to a billboard that said we could
|
|
get tax-free booze and cigarettes if we took the next exit onto navajo land. he
|
|
didn't say anything, i guess he knew what i meant, so i swung the car around and
|
|
we watched the sky burn up into blue-grey cinders till we got hungry and went
|
|
looking for burritos.
|
|
|
|
It was really late and we both couldn't sleep and i, at least, was pretty sure
|
|
the motel's air conditioning was coating my lungs with some as yet untreatable
|
|
pathogenic mildew, so we took off, drove out of town and parked, listening to
|
|
the radio bleat out old bonnie raitt tunes while we lay side by side on the
|
|
hood, staring at the deep deep black sky pricked all over with stars. i told
|
|
him about route 666, the devil's highway, and how i'd read that some schizo
|
|
satanist had built a gateway (a lot of wrought iron and crazy talismanic
|
|
symbols) somewhere near el paso, where he thought the highway began, and how
|
|
other people think the trinity site is some transdimensional gateway, or maybe a
|
|
ufo landing site, and people who live near los alamos see ufo's all the time.
|
|
he thought the radiation had screwed everyone up, but i just looked around, and
|
|
i could feel the new mexico nite, its hot breath on my body, the stars' electric
|
|
humming up above, maybe the black ghosts of the mesas way in the distance, and i
|
|
could believe it all. the land of enchantment. he moved a little closer, and i
|
|
could feel the heat radiating from his body, now, and i could hear him
|
|
breathing, his heart beating, and he told me about the mesas around yuma; how in
|
|
the midsummer you could see their silhouettes all nite since the sunset never
|
|
completely faded. he told me that when he was little, he'd wander outside late
|
|
at night and talk to the silhouettes, cuz he could feel them, they never slept,
|
|
he felt them like you feel someone staring at you even though you're alone. and
|
|
when he got older, he'd hike up into the hills and watch the lites of yuma
|
|
flickering in the late hour, and he'd feel sorry for his little town in the
|
|
desert, and he could see as it slept in the summer night that it was frail and
|
|
exposed. he turned to me, and i stared into the charcoal black holes where his
|
|
eyes used to be, and we breathed each other's exhalations until the dew and the
|
|
dawn.
|
|
|
|
At carlsbad, i was beginning to feel sad cuz i knew i couldn't drive forever,
|
|
and my loneliness hurt worse cuz i wasn't alone, and, man, it was hot, and the
|
|
sky was just sort of a washed out white, bleached out by the heat. we clambered
|
|
into the giant sphincter hole and just kept hiking deeper and deeper into the
|
|
cool, dark bowels of the west, which just made me sadder, cuz there're no
|
|
secrets or treasures or answers under all that grand big haunted land, just
|
|
caves, rock formations, crystals lit up by track lites. the whole place smelled
|
|
of mildew and sunscreen and bat guano. we were both half-asleep when the west
|
|
finally moved its bowels and left us in a heap beneath the greying sky. we
|
|
watched the bats swarm out of the caves like a blur, like the ghosts you see
|
|
when you close your eyes, that you can never look at directly, cuz when you do
|
|
they vanish. i don't know how long we slept, but when the ranger shook us awake
|
|
it was very dark and god only knows where the bats had gone.
|
|
|
|
I had to see the ocean again. we drove all night, and most of the next day, and
|
|
i just felt sad and lonely cuz i knew he wanted to get back to yuma, and that'd
|
|
be it. it was a long drive, and everything was sort of flip-flopped, cuz the
|
|
desert was like the sea, and we were adrift on the desert like castaways. it
|
|
was night again when we drove into santa cruz, and the boardwalk was closed and
|
|
the ferris wheel and the roller coaster hung in the sky, dark and still. it was
|
|
chilly, and i could hear the breakers and the pacific was ink black, a void that
|
|
sucks in the heartbeats of castaways, and that's the noise i heard, the rhythmic
|
|
pulse of the surf is the sound of stolen heartbeats. no one was around, and it
|
|
seemed like my loneliness had swallowed me whole, here i was, goose-fleshed and
|
|
shivering in the void. he got restless so we got in the car and turned around
|
|
and drove back into the desert.
|
|
|
|
That was the last time. now yuma's ahead, a bright smear along the desert's
|
|
brow. i stop about 5 miles east of town, and i get scared, cuz it all looks the
|
|
same, i think i recognize a coupla buildings. it's weird, if you stand back far
|
|
enough, things seem the same, they don't change. but i guess you can't spend
|
|
your life parked 5 miles this side of change, or of time. inevitably you get
|
|
hungry, or bored, and you move in, and time moves in behind you, and you're
|
|
trapped. that's when it's time to screech out of town and drive after the
|
|
setting orange sun. and if you drive fast enough, maybe you can keep up, and
|
|
the sun won't set, it'll just fucken hang in the sky, orange and angry, forever.
|
|
|
|
[cDc communications holds the copyright for the first three paragraphs of this
|
|
file. Text from "Angry Sun" copyright (c) 1997 cDc communications, reprinted by
|
|
permission of the author.
|
|
|
|
-=< HISTORY OF THIS ARTICLE >=-
|
|
|
|
circa 1993: This file appears as a G-File on Franken Gibe's BBS, The /<ingdom
|
|
of Shit.
|
|
1997: cDc communications publishes an abridged version of the file (the
|
|
first three paragraphs only), calling it "Angry Sun" (cDc331.txt).
|
|
1999: GwD secures Franken Gibe's permission and blessing before
|
|
publishing the file in its entirety (including Gibe's original
|
|
capitalization and paragraph structure.)]
|
|
|
|
-----------------------------<GwD Command Centers>------------------------------
|
|
GwDweb: http://www.GREENY.org/
|
|
GwD Publications: http://gwd.mit.edu/
|
|
ftp://ftp.GREENY.org/gwd/
|
|
GwD BBSes: C.H.A.O.S. - http://chaos.GREENY.org/
|
|
Snake's Den - http://www.snakeden.org/
|
|
E-Mail: gwd@GREENY.org
|
|
* GwD, Inc. - P.O. Box 16038 - Lubbock, Texas 79490 *
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
"I've been everywhere, man. I've been everywhere."
|
|
- Geoff Mack, "I've Been Everywhere"
|
|
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
|
|
|
-+- F Y M -+-
|
|
|
|
GR33NY LIK3S mash3d p0tat03s
|
|
|
|
MORE THAN FIVE YEARS of ABSOLUTE CRAP! /---------------\
|
|
copyright (c) 1993 Franken Gibe/copyright (c) MCMXCIX GwD Pubz :FIGHT THE POWER:
|
|
copyright (c) MCMXCIX GwD, Inc., except as noted : GwD :
|
|
All rights reserved \---------------/
|
|
GwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwDGwD71
|