Parallel Echoes | by Richie Israel

The thick black grease of the marker has stained the calendar today, marking my unfaltering farewell from New Capital City.

Certain figures lurch upon us with the savage territorial authority of knife teethed piranhas. They demand us to elevate them above culture, and it is them, under our frayed strings of direction, who we firstly come to when lost.  But rather these biting golems are disassociated to our culture, in such a way that their claimed role as brutal installers of conduct gutters out into a mere state of frightening comedy.

The other day, one of them, a lumpy lunkhead attired in a collared blue costume hung with medallions, and various glossy weapons protruding from his belt, impudently intruded upon our tranquil picnic. He then loftily pointed at a disagreeable bottle of pleasurable liquid. He profaned this disagreeable bottle and with crawling clumps of fingers demanded for everyone’s identity cards, targeting even those who knew nothing to the existence of this profaned bottle. He then handed back an unquestionable golden pamphlet stating that something was to be seized from those who exposed their

identities, some irrelevant monetary supplement that would drown everyone in pitiful burdens, except for this lone actor in costume. As a tyrannical performance on a glittering theatre stage, this act would have found its glorious humor, but publicly his gesture was painted with the colors of insanity.

To avoid any involvement, one that could eventually lead to a bloating brain tumor, or a deep tearing strain of spectacular anxiety, I told the man who was suffering from these unnameable delusions that I had no such identification that he requested. Although in truth it was snug cozily in my pocket. But I simply refused to have my personal life deducted only because I agreed, although I really had no other choice, to have an identity, of which I was expected to carry where ever I went for the purpose of this strange control.

The costumed performer was not alone, his many accomplices, thousands throughout New Capital, dressing alike and roaming with ruthless pomposity, far absent they are of even the bare minimum amiable conduct needed to allow a society to feel self reliant for their own respective nature. These men are undoubtedly the opposition to our happiness.

 

 

There have been plans to leave, and now they have materialized. My original intent and feelings for my leave have been forgotten and I am simply attached to its departure. The feeling closely resembles the moment when someone gives you the gift of a new sweater that, although outside of your aesthetic, you find fits you well, a you that has always been there, but never quite expressed. Arriving at the present of something already planed for comes from that outside; an outside conjured from the past.

Where I am now the air is clogged with recycled breaths, and no one can move very far, if they even wished to move at all. I would be surprised if anyone around me knew precisely where they were. Although everyone would freely agree to where they had come from and where they were heading. Most people here are sympathetic towards those two poles, one which they are eagerly crawling forward to and the other which they are temporarily aspiring to drain out of their memories. The present is what bothers them, like a hammer perpetually slamming at the toes, and they are finding any means possible to escape from what is presently between.

Reading is a form of escape they choose. It is a narrative tangent, sliding away, but spatially linked by one’s consciousness to the every moving present. The final pages of the book being somewhere lingering on their way to that pole, looking forward

It could not be more obvious that I am in a different place. The air is different. The people around me are expressing different emotions, mostly warm and communicative. I had been dropped off in a place that I had been before, but long enough ago to have not remembered it in detail. It was a pallid yellow house, walled off by a tall patched metal gate that left only in sight a weakly peeking roof.

This was the city of San Palimo in its industrial district, near a port. Cement factories were churning, and food distribution warehouses were sorting and delivering. The vastness of the empty streets, which were large enough to stage a carnival, and the exotic plants that bloomed for the pockets of the vacant lots, left the residue of neither alienation nor isolation as one would expect in such area lived in by almost no one, but warm and open as if this place would be unobstructed by certain cultural regulations that would surely be present within the populated hysteria of elsewhere.

 A young man with short haggardly parted hair and a tightly brass-buttoned thickly woven collared shirt pinched into his firm blue canvas work pants, drifted out the front door of the house.

“Hello, I’m Jerome, Are you here for the lecture?” he said with no other motives than a positive welcoming, constructed with the tender stretch of a smile and eyes unwilling to migrate from their contact.

“No, I never knew a lecture was suppose to exist here,” I said, as expectation I realized were more than ready to fall heavily into an implosive state where I would no longer be able to recognize them, but willing and attentive I was of what was happening to cast itself upon me.

“Yes, I’ll be giving a lecture today. It’s a surrealist take on an ancient form of brain relief called trepanation, and the contemporary application for it.”

I knew that Jerome was not a scholar on such subjects, and most likely fell into the topic on temporary interest, or a longing desire to stage a lecture irregardless of its subject.

 The lot that they all had been living, or better, existing amidst, was a decommissioned bus station held once to organized psychedelic desert excursions for the purpose of nothing other than the chaos of pleasure. Now it is their home, a site which they operate on. Atop the packed soil, there are chickens dancing within the small confines of cages while laying eggs with orange yolks, later to be scrambled and served. Henrik, who lives in a small room inside the house, had told me a story of how he had to laboriously hand graft the skin off one of the white chickens after it was viciously gored by one of the black chickens.

 “Now we separate them,” he said, “Their beaks are so infested in bacteria that the only way to prevent any fatal infections is to feather the bird and shave off a small layer of skin. There is something both nurturing and disturbing about the process.” Henrik's height was such that he had to swing his body into a tilted orchestration of unbalanced movements just so he could freely meander through the room and gaze down upon those he was speaking to.

“I can imagine,” I replied empathetically, although I couldn’t really even imagine.

 The lecture began in the basement, beneath the sheltered chickens and past the various pots of growing vegetables in sadly states of rot. The space was dirty with scattered pieces of shoddily welded pipes pushed up against the wall, an unswept floor of loose paper cut-offs, along with unfollowable timetables and schedules pinned to a warped corkboard. There was a long table stained with a whirlpool of coffee and beer spills spanning the center of the room. Surrounding it were chainsaw gnawed log stumps serving as seating. Within an hour a crowd of friends and timid strangers arrived and pulled up to whatever they could sit on.

“Hello Everyone. Please will take one of these identity badges,” Henrik called out, carrying down a small basket of name tags, some had been directly associated to certain individuals while others more ambiguous to what they could be identifying. The tag I reached for was similar to the others, appearing as an officially hacked corporate display, pasted over with intentional aesthetic deviances, marking it clearly as an institutional reclamation.

Jerome clicked on the projector, and the lecture began with the illuminated moving image of an elder man obsessed with his own speech, preaching towards the movements of a life dwelling itself only in the present. This man, whose flaking facial skin was patched with red burns and eyes, an empty frosted blue of frightening paleness which sunk beneath eyebrows so thin that light could barely capture their visibility, this man spoke with such an awkward tempo that he advertently brought the listener uncomfortably into the present, into the silence of his pauses. When it ended I was left with such a freedom of glory for being able to withstand such dullness, and congratulated myself for completing this lesson of endurance.

It wasn’t long before Jerome went on to explain the process of trepanation, a medical procedure of boring a hole into one’s skull to relieve the pressure of cerebral fluids. Showing not only medieval woodcuts depicting the gruesome act, but also some contemporary self surgeries, he proceeded to give mention of some convincing success stories along with some pathetically illusionary ones.

“Now Everyone, I want you all to contort your face into a grotesque masks, and then throw the imaginary mask towards some one sitting adjacent to you,” Jerome announced. A test to lose your own image into its distortion, I thought. Although forced theatrical participated always leaves me with a feeling of cheerlessness and guilt for summoning an inauthentic representation, while playing myself to temporarily believe that I am truly sharing a part, a part which is only a parasite to my believed behavior. But I contorted my face as did everyone else, and for a second I felt the isolation of my own awkwardness, and then we hid it all behind our bellowing laughter.

There was only so much surgical operations we could all witness the image of before we all had over exerted our pity towards this unknown cult of individuals unafraid of the drill. Luckily our attention was diverted away from its visceral goreness to a much softer philosophical departure by a well dressed man sitting next to me, with a combed mustache and long brown hair, who stood up as if called upon and spoke.

“One can think of this process like a prisoner who serves his entire life carving away at a brick in the wall. By the end of his time, he has tired himself only to remove one brick. He has relieved himself those few inches but can not escape the reminder that he is still entrapped into a cell which he can never leave.” Relieving the pressure in the brain by some pseudo-medical process of drilling a cavity is only one brick removed from the necessary cell of the skull.

 That night I slept in a trailer that was lifted onto a sloping lot of coarsely spread concrete. It was cold but a few borrowed blankets convinced the body otherwise. I didn’t feel like walking all the way to the house to relieve the urine out of me, so I pissed in the sink, but the sink was clogged with food sludge, so I had to soak the piss through torn paper towels and napkins and small rags which very quickly made me think that I should have rather used the toilet inside. I imagined that if the person who usually slept in this trailer found out that I pissed in their sink, they would have surely been wishing that

they hadn’t let me in there, so I did my best to rid of it all.

In the morning before anyone had awaken, before the sun had awaken above its horizon, I had already left, atop a bicycle heading north, carrying my nomadic home behind me. The black rubber rolled alone across the road, too early to be joined by any fleet of cars along with their exhaust and their noise, over waves of deformed pavement and lost trolley tracks which were submerged beneath newly built sidewalks. The tires rolled over the flattened trash relentlessly impacted into the asphalt, over soft tar and cardboard blown from its ties. Above the tires, an orange frame of steel locked the wheels into a perfect spacing so they could roll together in unison endlessly on a line imagined and enacted only by its conductor.

 The bicycle with all its finely tuned elegances was like the most compromising pet who would do anything within its mechanical abilities to follow and please your every actions. In my case, the actions took place almost entirely in the legs, the calves and the thighs; gastrocnemius, vastus lateralis, and patellar ligaments, they were its engines.

 

 On the edge of San Palimo, hugging the ebbing ship docks and noisy recycling plants, the Guelters Bay lifted those septic clouds of rough odors across the vacant but impassable lots and upon me. I wore a coat of its repulsion. Eventually the emanating foulness would be brushed away when the northern ridge was reached, where the fresh Aleoris Ocean gusts would stray their way through the narrows of the industrial valleys and sweep across our faces, with the forever emotionless breath of the invisible.

I had crossed a rattling drawbridge that had been reconstructed after it had been declared structurally inadequate. The way it was rebuilt, was an identical operation as it was made more than one hundred years ago, with processes and materials of building that are now totally obsolete.  But now it was gone, as I reached a bustling corporate zone of prefabricated food markets with aproned cheese cutters, of daytime transvestite prostitutes in their flagrant transit, and of human scavengers lurking upon valuable trash heaps yelling at unknown commodities which they find to be infecting their brains. Huddles of people in tightly knit blackened suits uncomfortably brush against women in ripped thrift rags, each finding themselves bickering silently over their undying obligations.

And now I am in a zone filled with luminous foreign characters, some translated, others marking insular bodies of a separated culture hidden behind fish and eel stands, with daikon roots floating in murky jars and unlabeled mounds of candy rising until it spills over into the street where its syrupy gum is smeared beneath the hammered in leather soles of unfit shoes. Babbling hoards, even at this early hour, gather around as their bagged goods are weighed on shaky scales and exchanged into quick hands, bargained and rejected by scowling mouths and at times snuck in between the lips.

As the hill slopes down at a steep rumbling incline my fingers grip around the firm handlebars. The street leads me onto a boardwalk flocking with visitors. It is obvious that this was the primary spot held to the attention of these visitors, because of the simplicity of it all, announcing itself within all possibilities of its importance and relevance. Now stepped on with white sneakers, and flashed at with machines that documented one’s presence, presently there. These people who placed themselves amongst this fragment of history could then leave satisfied knowing that they have tasted authenticity, but truthfully they had only worn its mask, which if looked deeply through, would observe that no one around them was a resident of the actual city, and they were all truly visiting a simulacrum of its fiction.

Looming above the sweeping fog that sifted slowly through the rows of abandoned barracks and cute gable roofed homes of frenetic yellows, mud purples and chemical blues, grew a great red bridge with its industrious mouth plummeting into a rising hill of eucalyptus. The coiling cables of the bridge were towering and taught, while the lane, which cinematically evolved meticulously slow, spanned until it could faintly be seen into the depths of clouded mountains and sharp ridges of the cliffs.

In reaching the end of the bridge’s suspension, the single figure is found to be epically small  against the overshadowing ruptured black scabrous rocks, where barnacle ridden surfaces are licked with the tumult of the tumbling waves’ hissing waters, and the roar of the highway’s surging traffic. Only a screaming breaths length outside of the constructed synapse that bolts itself to San Palimo does one recognize the upcoming call from this anonymous provocation, this outside where it all begins.

 

 

“What a beautiful campsite and all, but damn these flies are relentless.” said the robust man with a carpet of fur rising behind his stately clean white jumpsuit. The balding blonde spots of hair were not sheltered beneath the ill fit straw hat that was struggling on its last strands of weave. And his thin wire framed glasses that collected the bubbling sweat dripping from the creases in his forehead, was consistently sliding away from his stubby blunt nose. He was fighting to give himself the moment to speak as he was despairingly swatting away the flies which swarmed to his skin like a nebula of iron filings gravitating towards a magnet.

 The flies had come to me in such a helpless amount that I had abandoned all attempts to rid of them. My legs became cloaked with buzzing insectile threads that deteriorated and flew away as I moved, only to come back into its dreading annoyance. Unlike the symphonic beauty one might find tooting and squealing through the forest, the noise of the flies was as pleasant as a cacophony of car alarms. I felt if only I could just hide into my tent. I rushed to put it together. For such a simple structure there was an unfortunate amount of steps. The flies were now covering my face. I had to blink them away. I could feel that the tent poles were unwilling to fit together. There would be nowhere to hide. I stuffed the tent back in the back of the bag. I was on top of a mountain. The beach and its plane of ocean could be seen illuminated by the orange sunset, closing towards darkness. Riding down the snaking hill, the sun had finally let go of the sky. Surprisingly calm I was, knowing that the idea of where to sleep that night was distantly absent.

A woman at an unmarked lodge was just closing before I inquired about a room. She was dressed as though she was selling pharmaceuticals to a company, her body squeezed into a tight suited vest atop a short black pin-striped skirt. She had long straight black hair smelling of a recent shampoo while her face was painted with thin strokes of mascara and wet lava lip glaze that disguised the empty smile prattling her words.

“Come, I’ll show you the room.” she said. We were standing in the lobby on a plush fake bear rug under ornamented post and beam timbers with printed landscape paintings hung from the walls on gold embellished frames. There was a bookshelf full of decorative mystery novels that no one would read, yet the place felt expensive, taintless and underused.

“I care very little of what the room looks like, I would have slept with the flies if the tent wasn’t broken,” I told her. She didn’t give hint of an expression. Instead she replied gracelessly,

 “Yea the season gets messy like that.”

 Somewhere out into the expanses of sand there lies a small whale beached between the rocks. I recall the groans from the disinterested ranger who overlooked the scene humbly through his binoculars from the station perched just above the boulders, staring dispassionately as though this was common and self correcting.

People most likely are grateful to stay in such a comforting lodge. An old couple was spotted earlier caressing each others lips with a sense that some miracle had gotten them to where they were. I just wanted to go to sleep, and the stench of fifty kilometers of strenuous bicycling was obvious in the displeasure I was sending upon their lovely romances. The slightest insecurity would have entered me if it wasn’t for my deading exhaustion. I spoiled myself with more blankets then I could have ever needed, and fell sensationally well into a lost deep sleep.

 

The sailboats were floating as always in Lacota Bay tied and roped to their anchors. Aside from a few bobbling silver rafts and fisherman row boats, the water was vacant. Against the stillness, seen behind the port windows of the idling yachts, a dozen muscular men in teal linen worker suits could be made out clearing after last nights disastrous gorges of daiquiri and tequila. The creaking of the dock’s soggy wood and the cracking of the crab cages could be heard that morning and every morning after, as the awakening sound that marked the town’s beach edge.

 A woman climbed out of a long beige recreational vehicle scared with cataclysmic highway lacerations, and skipped over to me dangling a netted bag over her shoulder. She reached into the bag with an arm adorned with handmade bracelets crawling up her like a ragged sleeve.

 “Have one, they’re from the garden.” Her rural accent was strong and her cheeks were baked from the sun.

“What are these?” I said, twisting the bulging globule around between my fingers.

“Lemons! Ain’t no puny grocery size, this is the real thing. I picked them off just this morning.” She had a sway to her head as if pleasantly rolling marbles between her skull.

“What am I supposed to do with this? It’s almost as large as my face.” I tossed it up several times to feel its weight.

“Cut it open, sink it in.” She flipped open a pocket knife as though it was routine and slit the lemon into four equal parts. She licked the juices of one of the slices more erotically then I would have expected. Then held the other piece and swiftly pressed it to my lips. I was unaccustomed to this type of intimacy of strangers and withdrew for the moment. Then with a healthy clench of the teeth, ripped it pulp and all, away from the tart skin. It would be ambitious to imagine a more delicious lemon.

“That’s some load you got there. Where you heading?” She wore a patched yellow dress that  draped loosely over her tight jeans where small holes were beginning to tear around the knees. Her flaxen blonde hair, jumbled like a bird’s nest, was held back by a few wooden pins hiding behind her tiny freckled ears. She blinked quite frequently when she spoke and stared deeply at everything as though each sight needed its duration.

“As far north as I can make it.” I replied casually, slanting against the wall of the public toilets at the deserted filling station.

“Well if you need a ride, we’re heading up to my brothers greenhouse in Los Duragos. Don’t hesitate to ask.” She danced herself around and gave one last smile, waiting for a response before she swung the door shut to her trailer, and skidded off into the dust road, leaving only a faint rectangle amongst the cloud of rustic powder. I threw the sticky lemon peels beyond the patch of dying weeds and headed out.

 

 Ruling winds blew from the Aleoris Ocean and whistled against the ears. The climbs were steep and my knees felt as through they were ripping at the tendons. A party of huge trucks hauling long stacks of redwood logs rushed past me, while other more fearful drivers in petite vehicles stayed slow, easing around the bends of the carved precipices. The coast revealed scenes romantic painters had over exhausted themselves to depict, with the mist of sea foam harboring autonomous jutting rocks, towering and haired with untouched settlements of trees, where flocks of birds spiraled around these

arboreal towns as if wrapped in a mad cyclone, and the waves, coming crest lines, would pull endlessly into the jagged slobbering stones.

 His name was Tony Bentiago. His arms were fat like infant seals and his face was roughly shaved and plumply joyous. He was ready since yesterday for a conversation as I slugged over to his aquamarine juice bar to find him lounging on a stool with his elbows spread against the counter.

“Hey buddy, where are you staying tonight?”

Unusual question to confront some one with as they first meet, I thought, however it was getting dark.

“I guess I haven’t really thought about it yet, just here to get some juice.”

“Ellen!  Get the man some juice,” he called back beyond the counter, a women came back with wrinkled skin and balloon breasts that hung beneath a cutoff white cotton shirt. One of her arms was covered with tattoos of past lovers, violent goddesses, and spiraling seascapes. Although very old, she retained the vitality of a young teenager, but one also repressed by a catalog of it’s misfortunes. She handed me back a porcelain cup of milky blueberry iced sludge and collected my few wrinkled bills.

Tony had turned around and was watching traffic with a bearing of dignity as though considering the  unconscious presence his colorful store would have on the passenger’s thoughts. He explained that he was a practicing surgeon, and had gathered enough wealth to purchase property all throughout the coast. He pointed at one of his stores that was deliberately painted in a way which confused one of how

to visually approach it, and said with enough satisfaction, laughing to himself,

“In a state all drugged out on hallucinogens, you got to keep people’s attention.”

Probably here people managed to conceive of designing for altered perception as a respectable science. One could imagine certain educational institutions throughout employing courses evolving around such an approach with comically transcendental undertones. Would someone need antioxidants to cleanly analyze their mental diversions, or would being permanently distorted serve as the best method? Standing here from the outside it all seemed unsettlingly ridiculous, but from the inside, where you were no longer standing but rather floating, it seemed profound.

“There’s a barn, just down the hill. You’re welcome to sleep in it. Just push away some hay bales and find yourself a spot.” Tony rested his hand on my shoulder as if we were departing friends, maybe we were.

“What color is the barn?” I asked with that big city specification. I had run into such abundances of kind gestures that I no longer was surprisingly thankful, but instead focused on clarifying which offerings best suited me.

The inside of the barn creaked with the wind and the hay bales, bricked walls of damp dead grasses, smelled of sweet earth. Next to the corrugated metal siding of the barn, two tractors had tumbled over and weeds were growing through their parts. The houses alongside the tractors were sad and failing shelters but retained the shadows of people still living in them. A frightened dog chained around a concrete post kept me awake all night, until it got real cold, then the compassionate owner came and pulled the animal inside, and then there came a silence that was so silent that I just waited for something to disrupt it. The disruption eventually came in the form of a dream.

 

Seeing something so often in the mind, over exposing its image before ever encountering it in the real sense, can dilute the sensation from its presentation, to a point where one might lose bearings of where the original lure arose from. This precisely identifies what occurred the moment I had encountered the big trees, enormous Sequoias that sprung from the earth’s soil far before our wave of settlers even inhabited this country. When I had encountered these trees, they came not with surprise but matched the forms that conjured in my thoughts. It was only after I slept beside them for a night that I realized that these trees obviously had no intentions of awl, other then the awl towards themselves for the capacity to stay so long alive amidst the multiple waves of deaths that flushed before them, and the awl in looking down upon the most superior thinking organism, us, who could not outlive them. This spending time with,  or being there amongst its uncallable change, is something that an image, even in the mind, will forever fail to measure up to.

The petals orbital twisting, cranking and churning of a greased chain. Gears spinning, clinking, coasting, changing. The leather saddle creasing, slipping, biting at the bones, compressing the muscles of the rear, An unforeseen game of hills peaking and falling, leveling and bending. A fork in the road carves a crag into a methodical division, a pull off drags its rubble into the softening earth.  Inclining, declining, the equilibrium of the body can measure its slight degrees. Signs inform of remotely unfamiliar towns, or announce disappointing reveals towards impossible reaches The gravel is crispy, smooth, rugged, grey and unchanging. The braking hiss of rubber and  aluminum drones against the whistling of the leaves, only you witness this waiting, this abstract approach to thirst while you gurgle down the remains of the water until in is all gone from its empty tin canister. This drought of the tongue gathers upon you like an enemy, an insult, for where are you? You are nowhere, nowhere where there is water.

“Sawyers Glen- four miles” the sign clearly expresses. Let us endure.

 Sawyers Glen is not a town in the traditional sense that it offers anything to the outsider. Instead it is a place where everyone isolates themselves into single story homes with locked gates walling behind the seclusion of their deep darkening forest yards. Children approach, aiming their plastic guns as though they were gate keepers while a low riding Cadillac whizzes by and skids into the next driveway.

Three sweaty shaved head men break out of the car, crushing be er cans into their fists and throwing its crumples into their lawns.

 “There’s no water in this town,” The taller one says with a wolf smile. His chest is branded with an unkempt map of tattoos, emblems of the deepest symbols of hatred, so proudly worn, like badges of loyalty to an elite collective of anger and intolerance, rejecting their own cultural incompatibility as if living cooperatively within the confines of a well. The well is Sawyers Glen, soaked with the rotting corpses of fallen animals. The impalpably dark and motionless bog of water is inked with their poison.

 

 “It's funny how amendment number four was simply removed from this pamphlet. I suppose the right to revolt clearly isn’t relevant anymore.” The kid must have been just finishing high school. His curly hair, checkered shirt and silken trench coat suggested an undeveloped clash of style accustomed to that age. He held the constitution in one hand while another radical manifesto was bulging from a torn pocket. The others on the bench, much older then him who had surely had their way with political injustices could not take the kid seriously. Some folks in the back looked as they had just rolled around on  the floor of a car mechanics garage, but more likely it had taken them months to get to the filthy state they were in. Beside them along the sidewalk was a young couple who had days before finished a five thousand kilometer bicycle ride across the country. They had an air to them as though they had seen everything and were now enlightened with all their worries unloaded along the way. As much as I tried to fight it, I was proud of them, for this might be the beginning of their lives, of what they are to be.

There was one man who stood out like a prophet. He had partnered his cane, had a long bristly beard, small squinting eyes, and was wandering in a direction undefined by streets. He seemed to half outlived a very long pilgrimage and was forever within reach, but was not quite there, to where there was. He couldn’t tell you in any verbal way, but he knew. The others were temporal vagabonds, geographically boundless but locally familiar. And the remaining were attending colleges, far from interested in this absence of clarity, determined within their internal values for change in a more institutional sense. And of those, the majority could be found at bars screaming to those they mistook as friends, or in the backyards of borrowed houses, or bent legged on carpets vacant of furniture drinking away memories and redefining new ones.

If you would chose to wake up early enough, you would find mothers carrying their children to school on bicycles. They had cars parked next their houses, but actively chose this way.  There was a steel boat elevated off the ground, unfinished, cladded in plates. And we were miles from the sea. Its nautical skeleton sat like an unwanted monument. Along the road, within that small slither of space where alternative mobility made its way through, bicyclists rode one after another, in every imaginable way that would get them through the night. Hitchhikers we saw, more so here than anywhere else in the country, reaching their thumbs in desperate needs to get somewhere. They would accept any distance of lift if it was rightly directed.

 We settled in a van scattered with junk: uncapped pens, rolls of wax paper, politically heated water soaked books, a brown pit bull and a young French girl dressed in boy’s clothes. The driver had just picked her up minutes ago from the hostel. She rolled her own cigarettes and spoke coolly. The couple after her that joined us in the van was making their way north to the Arctic ridge. The two had just days before expelled their last energy at an ending techno surging festival in the desert where rampant nudity and wild mechanical fabrications flourished. She had pinched cheeks, widely amazed eyes,

and walked in an indecisive manner. He had long knotted blonde hair, a patchy beard, glossy eyes, and carried himself carelessly and clumsily. The campsite that they were asked to be dropped off at was an opening nestled in a forest of tall pines, with a great ovaliptical lake just beyond the trees.

There was an unannounced moment where we had entered into an erased world that left behind only its minimal beauty. The cream light powder sand that had blown from the dunes spread across a beach with inperceivable ends, the fog clouding both sides of its stretch. Behind the dune crests, the  shore became a sanctuary, a hidden focus, inside and away. Speech seemed to be part of a temporal unwanted outside that would complicate the purity of what we were seeking, a sustained silence that could keep us temporarily, being there.

 

Port city on the other hand was a quiet madness of complexity, woven by hundred year old bridges that spanned its dark rivers. I carried myself atop an esplanade that bent its circulating flow along grated suspensions, along underpasses and extending dock lines. Sloping from the infrastructure, there were firm knolly grass lawns that captured the collective of homeless and unhomely individuals. And there were readers, so many eyes drowned into books that it might be believed that there was an upcoming city wide exam. Unconfined to solitude this literary populace was, and even the self governing tent cities huddled beneath the bridges were scattered with books. Some of them looked frightened, as though their concentration would not be enough to get them through the pages. Even bent into the trunks of gnarly trees, books have been violently thrown. As I was weary of the dangerous bicycling readers who propped the pages with one hand and gripped the brake with the other, I grew even more afraid of the taxi drivers sunken into the study of thousand page novels while losing themselves across the lanes of sparking electric trolleys and racing automobiles. The dual mind-motor of Port City, of those being there and elsewhere, simultaneously brought forth a dimensional breach that inevitably caused for the advent of a universal half trust in everyone’s ability to understand one another. If one didn’t accept this self sacrifice towards separation, they would inescapably become stranded into a culture which was only part physical.

 A slender but solidly built ladder had taken me up upon a high platform built around an enormous willow tree that rose like a city of its own in Forest Gulch public park. I was sitting amongst a group of elderly people all closely cross-legged in the middle of a circle of bodies slipped into their sleeping bags. One of the women, with soft grey hair tied behind her with a rip of twine, was holding a hardcover in front of her face and was reading loudly with strong pronunciations and heavy accents. The language was one I couldn’t quite identify, something Slavic. The crowd around her was deeply immersed into her words and nodding with haunting slowness. What she was speaking was the collective fragments to the arcane stories of these people’s lives.

 

I am again returning to where I was just a few weeks before, where the air is stuffy and where no one can move very far if they even wished to move at all. Their faces are replaced with those of others, and these replaced bodies are cramped against one another like boxes in a warehouse. Tall women in blue uniforms occasionally hand out bags of peanuts and cheap crackers. The line for the toilet is slow,  and those waiting in line are squeezing their legs together, fighting from letting go.

Where I arrive to couldn’t be more obvious that it is a different place, one which I had dwelled for nearly a decade but had forgotten its essences. The air here is thicker and less clean. The emotions expressed around me are cold and removed, insular yet blankly inspired. Again the costumed men, those garnished in medallions and glossy weapons, are seen, now on every street, some awaiting disagreement, other searching for it in their cult marked cars which blare the most irritating sirens that gnaw at the ears. Our civil taboos are more amplified by these actors breaking them, professing one thing while performing the other. Their theatrics of contradictions parade with the carnival of barbed wire handshakes. One day these men will dissolve into the comedy of history, and only the revivalists will depict their insanities. For now they are only fleas atop the husk of our cities, small buzzing frights which one can brush away to cleanly observe the boundless social magloria that gleams before them, a place where somewhere and everywhere there is a palpable piece for each amongst the grandest populace. It comes in skin and flesh, the ally to happiness. And that is why, alone in its reasoning, I have returned.

 

In the sense of being singular/plural, as every traveler should admit themselves as, the body is capable of being simultaneously bilocated into separate societies of thought. Within this duality, one of the societies living amongst this body is pragmatic, maintaining itself into categories, trusting preexisting knowledge and systems in order to appropriate itself into a culture which it sees as an assemblage of the constituent parts to all human behavior. The other society, is rather impulsive, wandering, and refuses to coincide absolutely with categories, nor conceive a taxonomy of life's complexities. This society sees culture as a cloud, and a friend, which has the potential to collaborate with its intuitions. If a map was drawn locating these two societies they would be marked thousands of miles apart, but yet bridged by one body, the tablet of which they were drawn onto. The tablet is you, and it is us.