"Amazing! A meta-nonfictional self-awareness run amok with twist after twist of twisted inside-outness. Thought provoking, inspiring, full of engaging characters doing interesting things, a good primer on the positive side of chosen homelessness and pop up community, direct action protest and disaster relief, alternative building methods, reservation life, vagabond cuisine and tons of sincerely comedic banter. A spiritual manifesto as the author uses dialog to wax philosophically while clever wordplay and lyrical phrasing polishes the prose."
"I can’t seem to put my review into words because these words are so far beyond the way language is normally used.
My favorite quality of philosophy is the ah-ha moment when something has been put into words that I’ve always felt and known as truth. The author’s writing philosophy in a way I’ve never read it before, in a way it’s never been told that I know of."
"When I was a kid, I read to escape ‘reality.’ The way I was being taught to understand the world left me feeling overwhelmed, so I would delve into the fantasy worlds of the books and become completely absorbed into the lives of the characters as I attempted to forget my own. This book on the other hand... This book helps you to remember. Remember the true nature of life, remember your own true nature.
Remember your power and your inherent connection to this awe-inducing world. Remember what it means to truly be free."
"I liked it."
Published without copyright 2024 by DJ Rankin.
No rights reserved.
All parts of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Please share.
This is a fictional work of nonfiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or not. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental and beyond the author’s current writing ability anyway. That being said, all of this stuff happened, exactly how we say it did, we’re not nearly creative enough to be making this shit up. We’re still somehow overpaid however, though hopefully you’ve found these words without a price tag, always free downloads and as many free paperbacks as we can afford, but please feel free to donate as much as you like to whichever active community is doing the work that you wish you could, or better yet, feel free to get involved in the next chapter of your own activity. And feel free to contact the author, he checks his email at least twice a year, whether he needs to or not.
Other titles kinda like this one
but not really
Step One: Save the World
Uncage Eden
Liberation's Garden
Vagabond Chic
The Galaxy's Guide to Hitchhiking
A stranger mistook me for human,
nearly convinced me I was.
Crawling from the underneath of a world they’ve forgotten to know.
Grime of a time lost in tomorrow’s memory.
At home inside an echo of the hidden.
Freedom rings the shadows.
Faint comfort beyond the outcast of light.
A life obscured by the margins of some other person’s story.
CHAPTER FOUR
Uh oh. DJ’s writing again. Somewhat obsessed though to hear him tell it he’s already two years behind before the end of week one. The first day he was lucky to squeeze out a complete sentence, a verbose constipation left little but a Rorschach on the papier. Please pardon my French, I do do it for fun though perhaps in poor taste, and also excuse my novel’s novicity, not everyone has had the pleasure of prewriting volume before volume of inside-out prose.
As it turns out, this is not even my own internal dialogue, but rather another diluted convolution of the same free pen he picked up ages ago, so I hope you can understand my inability to be myself in front of such a limited studio audience. We’ll start this engineer’s drawing in reverse, because for him to tell it straight through would make entirely too much sense, which he somehow does more than most people I know while still managing to rattle on about the most pointless hypothesi.
I’ve known DJ since back at camp, you know, that armed mercenary winter blizzard Standing Rock camp. He was our hasenpfeffer chef extraordinaire, since then our paths have been somewhat interwoven with me seeming to do most of the weaving, by that I mean driving his broke ass halfway across the country or back. Just a lighthearted dig into his rabbit hole, he pretty much exclusively catches rides already headed that way, plus I would more than happily drop my own quest for knowledge to get him wherever it is he claims to be divinely called to. Even with my deeply ingrained disbelief of anything otherworldly, I must admit he’s got some magnetic power that pulls him to and fro, often without him even knowing where or why, then all of a sudden it becomes glaringly apparent and he hops out the passenger door to not be heard from until next year’s grand adventure.
He’d be too much to believe if I didn’t know him, and too much to take seriously even though I do. I promise his proper
ganders into the world around him and idealized views on how we should live are genuinely him, not some caricature for high brow literature’s sake, his philosophies are out there to most but his sincerity brings them all closer to Earth than any other way of life ever could be.
And he really doesn’t use any money, like at all, for six or seven years or whatever, and not at all in a way than anyone could ever consider him a bum or a freeloader or anything like that. He’s somehow developed a life of momentous living that frees him up to give back far more than he could ever consume, he definitely drinks a lot of coffee though.
You’d never know his wealth by looking at him, tattered and patched and not from a lack of offered apparel but by a commitment to make the most from every thread of another’s life. He proudly claims to pass as homeless when he traverses the country until he returns to Asheville where he just looks like he’s in a band or something.
He’s way too humble to speak of his good side as himself, plus you’d never take his word for it anyway, so take it from me, everything he puts on the page is legit, unless it’s one of the made up bits, and even with those there is probably more truth than whatever the editor’s opinion would have to say about a suggested rewrite. And if you can’t trust this fictional character based on a real character describing the outside of our in-text author as he writes the very book you’re reading now, then what are you even doing here?
Just kidding, don’t leave, he needs every critic he can get, and besides, I think I’ve figured out that I’m less a character based on a version of me and more a version of me based on a character, who might also be based on me, or something like that. Either way, I should likely make for a reliably unreliable narrator.
*******
Nice. Now I can finally get some shit done. Successfully suckered this guy into telling my story so I can focus on more interesting topics, like learning how to be a writer. He’ll do a
fine job, it’s just a low-bar comedy sketch about the end of the world. He gets me in a way that only the altered ego of a split personality could, we share far more philosophies of freedom than I’m capable of capturing in ink, and from most angles he’s exceedingly knowledgeable in the real-life circumstances surrounding the broad conceptual misunderstandings I’ve shaped my entire parade around. And he’s a communist.
Not that there is anything wrong with that. I’m not not a communist, or a socialist, or whichever other flavor of favor pools together humanity’s quickly dwindling resources, and even further dwindling brainpower, to assemble a half-assed attempt of surviving this thing. I’m certainly no capitalist, and I’m pro worker’s rights though I’m more inclined to enlist the help of the unpaid, I find them the most tolerable and with a uniquely flexible schedule.
Where on Earth would one even find such a menagerie of misfits, you ask. How will you convince them to get up and do anything without dangling the rusty keychains of capitalism’s stranglehold, you ask. And how will you even eat, you ask.
Except you wouldn’t ask any of that. If you’ve already made it to this page then you either get it or are at least open to getting it. Or you’re one of the three who have read all my other books about the same old same old and you’re feeling pot-committed to see this trainwreck through. Or you’re my mom, hey mom :) Or you’ve randomly opened to this page in the bookstore to decide if it’s worth the bargain bin price they sell these for, almost. Otherwise you would have never gotten this deep in the mud without tossing me aside in frustration and possibly lobbied to reinstitute a book burning policy for the crumbling of my infracted structure and most indefensibly poor writing, but I’m working on that one, remember.
So what else will you ask, you ask. Well, that seems rather pretentious of me to assume the role of reader considering I have already usurped my own narrator’s agency, though then again there’s no guarantee anyone else will pick up where I left off so perhaps I’ll also be my own worst critic, eh, not too bad, I think I’ll give it fours stars, but to be fair we should go back and start at the end of the beginning...
Stylish Transient
DJ Rankin
That was your cue, my guy...
*******
“Oh shit,” the narrator stumbles as chip crumbs clutter his oratory ovation, “New to this, sorry.”
He really thought he had more time.
“I really thought I had more time.”
Told you.
“The way that guy goes on and on and goes nowhere of importance gets a little tough to follow, I think I picked up his scent though. No really, his scent, his stitched together pair of two corduroys of which neither have been washed in the last ever, but in his defense he does live in a house made of dirt.
Last time I saw those pants they were a little less wintered, that was in the fall and they were fading quickly even then. He was calling in another favor, although his social credit score seems as bottomless as his duct-taped coffee cup, plus this one wasn’t even going on his own tab, the Rock Lady wanted to hop in with the good-time bandwagon destined to rendezvous with the earthhouse season two.
Hardly out of the way, so I swung through Kentucky for a few homemade biscuits and a bit of backwoods banter, that’s way too much stuff for you to pack girl, we’re only going for a week, I think we will be alright without that case of chili. The rest of the cabin space was jampacked with her endless stream of consciousness until finally she fell out of it and I had some room to reflect on the drive to South Dakota.
UnSheltered Earth, that’s what he dubbed his end of this massive undertaking, already organized over fifty volunteers and enough repurposed supplies to build an entire house for five hundred bucks, and all without any digital divisiveness.
There is still a website and all that stuff, built it himself with a borrowed computer and stolen wifi, even somehow manages to
update the internet with pictures of progress every couple of weeks. I went out to help last year and haven’t been able to get it out of my mind, there ain’t no way I’m passing up on working off a little of this colonization I’ve put on since.
We build earthbag houses, or some call it superadobe, it’s pretty much just sandbags filled with dirt and stacked up tight.
There is obviously more to it than that, but it would take a lot of effort to sum it up further and I’m actively trying to forget about the drastic amount of physical labor I just resigned to.
We pull into his home away from the home he built away from home, for a homeless person he sure seems to dwell with significantly more structure than he writes. It’s the Sun Dance grounds, Harvey’s house to be more specific, although Harvey is only a made-up moniker to protect from identity theft in the unlikely event that any of these books get picked up by the local authorities. He is a medicine man and Sun Dance chief, one of the few remaining OGs, and somehow this dirt hippie white guy from bumfuck North Carolina has managed to work his way into becoming his right-hand man, or his helper as they’re called, responsible for tending the fire and aiding with ceremony, hauling wood and cutting grass and cooking soup and always more dishes and pretty much he’s the go-to-guy for the whole spiritual community, and that’s just his second shift job.
The firekeep’s eyes ablaze with delight as he rushes out to greet us, it has been over nine months but the instant we’re all together again it feels as if we have been deeply connected this whole time, a familiar sensation that’s easy to misplace amid the many miles between us but this moment here and now is undeniably yesterday’s tomorrow.
He doesn’t carry a phone, can’t afford one on his salary, but I’ve also seen him turn down offers of cellular sponsorship with zero interest and pure principle. It’s a convenient tool for keeping tabs on the troops and an easy distraction from a life unexperienced, so he shed it right along with most of the other conveniences of postmodern captivation and exchanged them for a walk most genuine to that voice inside that’s hard to hear unless you’re on silent. He hasn’t yet converted me, though I
am quite jealous of his disconnected connection sometimes, and it is unmistakably evident that he has developed a way to cultivate a level of presence in each and every moment of live interaction as life commands his undivided attention.
So we may not keep in touch when we’re out of reach, but when together it’s as if we’re both the main characters of our ensemble storyline, not simply going through the motions in the background of somebody else’s personal memoir.
*******
Good one. I think he’s catching on, just mix a bunch of words up in a pot and even the worst cook can get some of it to stick. We should skip a few pages though, he mainly seems to keep droning on about how awesome I am and his memory seems a bit fuzzy around our reunion celebration with Harvey, plus new writers can really run on sometimes it’s just better to flip ahead and save you both some embarrassment.
I’d already been on the rez since the spring, splitting time between EarthHouse 55 and Harvey’s, plus we also had a Sun Dance in there somewhere too, had hoped this convoy woulda made it for ceremony but Covid locked the wheels, threatened my dance as well but that is a twist for another sideline. He always delivers a ton of wild game, everything from alligator to zoologist, and this time he brought Rocksy, wopila, the only Earthworker who can outdirt me, if I can keep her out of the agates.
We had finished all of the bagwork last year, did the wood construction stuff before Sun Dance, like the door and steps and window, so since then we’ve just been plugging away on covering it up with cob, a few inches thick, a few long grueling inches thick. They always think it’s gonna go so fast with a supercrew, we’ll have this thing finished by week’s end, two days later they remember that this is a lot of work and start to crumble, except Rocksy, her hernia could be halfway to the ground and she’d still be slinging mud into the sunset and going on and on about nothing at all. We get along well.
There were a few of us regulars in and out of the house by this point, we hadn’t built in the second loft or the kitchen yet but it was still getting pretty comfy with plenty of room for heated card games and musical anomalies, which I often won but I’ll let him tell you all about that...
*******
Tornado watch this morning, here in the now as I write about before, a serendipitous setting for the deconstruction of our enclosed subject matter, but we’re already past that point of return, perhaps Alanis will bless us with another windpipe coincidence worth singing about.
Everybody sings around a bunch at EarthHouse 55, but me, and they’ll be singing about the most trivial made-up stuff that happens to catch their short attention span, as dumb as a measly morsel found on the dirt floor, but then it takes a deep left with an upbeat nonchalance spouting off well-manicured philosophies of food waste and tightly knit seeds left leaving the avid listener to decipher the point three ballpoint between genius and madman.
I may not have a voice for the singsong but they’re sure to sing my praises after dinner tonight, fireside sushi with some red snapper I caught out of Fukushima’s cooling tank. Me and DJ may get entangled in debate over the tiny intricacies of our own approach, but that’s only facilitated by the overwhelming likeness in our coalescing worldviews. We are wild boys. We eat from the wild, we live in the wild, we shit in the wild and author-willing we’ll die in the wild. We are not some separate element from all-that-ever-was with a soul-purpose of infinite expansion of the human experience, we are but a fingernail on the verge of clawing our way into obsoletehood if we can not prove our worth by strumming at least a few harmonies with the cosmic bass player.
I might not be able to wrap my head around the existence of God in my heart, but there ain’t no denying why they call this his country, skylit landscapes for days and a wide-angle nightline starring Orion the Hunter S. Thompson. And this
particular section of land, the ten acres of hillside hayfield chosen as perch for EarthHouse 55, it holds some special kind of serenity unmatched by even the sacred Sun Dance grounds, perhaps an extension of that same commitment to walk in prayer but with even less inside influence to overly confuse the narrative.
A non-mechanical worksite provides a calm canvas for whichever consensual discussion spurs the moment, room to grow as an amplitude of down-to-Earth volumes gain traction by giving way to their own coercive epiphany, each substation performing a minuscule crumble of context but the open space in-between blooms with composite collections of short stories we’ve convinced ourselves to mean something far greater than the egos who think they composed it.
It is a lot of work, all this monumental extrapolation can really take it out of you, but we’ve got a supercrew of all-stars, even the Rock Lady’s carrying her own weight in agates, we should definitely be done with the cob by the week’s end. DJ’s been doing most of the mixing with his toes dug in the sand, a barefoot blender transforming a puddle of mud into an artist’s rendering of the creator’s raw potential, interlaced plotlines of straw tangled in every direction which construct the tensile framework through which the clay is able to glue together the jigsaw grains of time.
The rest of us alternate between prepping buckets of the various ingredients and plastering clumps of sticky icky onto the upper echelon of our life-sized sandcastle. An intuitive carving of your own niche in the process, wet-handed weaving ties the shredded fiber of the next to the last, most work with printless fingertips though Rock Lady’s cobknob promises less thumbnail erosion than a fun-filled Saturday night. The art of sculpting more satisfying than the tedious tamping required to erect the double-curvature dome, a simultaneous funnel to the universe and megaphone to the Earth, windproof geometry of a tipi with the energy content of countless crystals, at least if we can stop her from picking all the agates out of the wall.
Three feet dug into the ground, halfway there if anyone wants to quit now, twenty-inch walls coil a thermal container
and next week’s water resistant coat should lock in another few months of working weather. It’s the perfect temperature in there now, a massload of equilibrium maintains a steady comfort, the automatic thermostat soaks in a day’s hard labor.
It’s called the thermal flywheel effect, it takes twelve hours for the sun’s radiation to penetrate the shell, by which time the babies inside welcome something warm to nuzzle up to. And after an evening of chilling, the solar heatsink has blown its load and it’s back to the cooling-off chamber for another hot one. Nearly worked up an appetite after all that, wonder if anyone would notice if I quit early to start dinner, probably gonna take a while to not cook an entire feast. Burning pallets light the spicy snapper, next year’s excavation underway for an ever-evolving firepit of proportional magnitude, it’s nearly impossible to not have a good time with this revolving cast of radicals. Early retirement contagious until cocoons are pried open for a much anticipated tournament of champions, nertz!
And there you have it ladies and gentlemen, I win yet again while your infallible hero struggles to find a corner to curl up in the dirt.
*******
Nope. No no no. It absolutely did not happen that way.
That little dickfart fuckface got cross-wired and thought he could pull one over on my faithful readership. You should be offended. In fact, you are offended, I would imagine, why who wouldn’t be offended by such sophomoric moronity disguising himself as a literate fictionist. Jokes on you pal, you’ve got no idea that I’ve been writing about you this whole time, and his story is historically written by the victor so better get with the program lest you find yourself under a study hall of justice of the peace of mind your Ps and Qs cause R U ready to rumble? I think not.
A meta-nonfictional self-awareness run amok, B-story characters cluing into their own existence as DJ looks up and acknowledges the very creator of his own universe, good one.
Unlocked understanding that we’re just vessels for the Great Spirit as they channel their experience, our experience, every character’s experience uniquely their own but also intricately knotted with the whole of creation. Same raw energy poured through individual filters, but obviously written by the same pen, similarities far outweigh the subtle nuance of altered ego.
To wake up and see the bigger picture one must merely open themselves to the creator’s flow, let thy hollow bone act as conduit of life immortal.
We have the free will to listen or to not. In times that it becomes hard to hear, we have the free will to quiet our mind and foster connection with the cosmos, or we can succumb to the incredible attention to detail our omnipresent author put into world-building as we get ourselves lost in the funhouse.
Either choice can be enriching to the overall storyline, perhaps cringeworthy at times as a character who thinks they’re the author tries to force feed a far-fetched narrative that simply doesn’t track, but rest assured that from a perspective beyond the page they have a pretty good idea how un-loose-endedly it’s all going to come together, without having to know jack shit about how we’re gonna manage to get us there.
So, short story long, might be about time to buckle down because I’ve literally driven cars until the wheels fell off, on the way to Sun Dance, so don’t think I’m not willing to take out a bridge or two if they get in the way of my upstream migration.
And little does he know that he’ll be under my magnifying glass with just enough rope to get burned...
*******
So, my major takeaway was that now DJ’s talking about himself in the third person, yet I’m the one stepping outside myself. And yeah, of course I know he’s been writing about me, he leaves his notebook sitting right there on the table like a big pleather-bound look-at-me, I’m so productive, look what I can do to save the world, except any idiot can write a book, how clever, how about go save a turtle and then maybe you’ll have something worth its weight in self-gratification.
And as for the card game, yeah he won, he always wins, it’s pretty sickening to tell you the truth, and in the off-chance that someone else gets close to clenching he just kicks it into high gear and rubs it in that he wasn’t even trying the entire time. He showed us this stupid speed battle solitaire game and it’s been the bane of my self-reflexive existence ever since.
“That’s the one he taught us during all the tornado stuff, innit?”
What? What even is this? I thought I was holding the feather and leading the witness, how is it the Rock Lady’s edging in wordwise?
“Dunno. But we all know that once I’ve got the mic I’m probably pulling a Mike and spilling my guts until my hernia can’t take it anymore.”
*******
“So then he said, ‘I’ve got cats,’” she said. “So he drives home on what seemed like the perfect sunny day, some dark clouds in the distance but that’s whatever, goes inside, pets the kitties and he’s gotta take a big ol’ dook, so he’s sitting there, right, butt-naked for some reason, don’t ask me why, and he starts to hear some kind of commotion outside, ‘Those fucking cats,’ he said, so now he’s flailing around butt-naked on the toilet, don’t ask me why, using one hand to open and slam the cabinet door to out-racket the racket while the other is clutching his poo knife waving it around with empty threats of stirfry and all the while he’s yelling ‘Shut the fuck up you fucking cats.’ I mean, he loves the cats, ‘I do, I really do,’ but these are just the outside cats, sure he still feeds the whole neighborhood of strays spiraling around the porch but they hadn’t worked their way inside yet, well a couple had, they just ran inside one day and dug so deep into his piles of music memorabilia that they live there now and only creep out once he’s sound asleep, way too much racket for that now though, couldn’t even take a shit in peace, and then it all of a sudden got quiet again. ‘Finally,’ he said and yelled back, ‘I’m gonna take my sweet ass time but when I get done I’m coming out
there and you better not have fucked nothing u p! ’ So he does, and then he does, except he can’t open his front door, ‘Those fucking cats have fucked up my porch,’ he said, so he puts on his pants, yeah he was still butt-naked for some reason, don’t ask me why, walks out the backdoor and around the house and his whole front porch is collapsed into a heap of rubble, ‘What in the fucking fuck did you cats do?’ he shouts, then turns around to see that his house stands alone in a four block wide path of devastation,” she concluded.
“Hang on, I’m not finished,” she said, “So then he said,
‘I’m gonna kill you fucking cats!’” she said he said, “And oh my God guys, hearing him tell this story was just the funniest thing ever.”
*******
Speechless. Better try, else leave room for you-know-who to resume her unsolicited recount. I know this was you Deeg, what the hell man, it was just a dumb joke about shuffled up cards, lighten up. And did she say poo knife?
It really was a shit show in Kentucky though. Tornadoes don’t get fun names like the cool storms because they don’t hang around long enough to hype up hysteria at the checkout, even though this one broke all the records, imagine that, its total trail on the ground was over two hundred miles and covered three states with emergency. DJ had been visiting the Carolinas just before Christmas when his wishbone began to tingle, no time for tinsel, the Rock Lady lived just a few miles outside the havoc so he started putting together a dream team.
That’s where I come in, but only after a week of them giving away some yuletide cheer for a holiday he doesn’t get wrapped up in though still suffered the obligatory stomachache of overconsumption.
He never considered himself any kind of disaster relief specialist, at least not in this local of a context, he was a big picture guy who built low-impact windproof homes, definitely not whatever thrown together chemical compounds were sure
to reestablish the settlement. It did offer a hands-on glimpse into how much toxic debris will be left from each house torn down by the currently underway ecological transition. There were piles of houses everywhere, reduced to bricks and mortar and shingles and splinters and pink cotton candy spun up in the fractured trees.
We separated it out by hand for the various claw trucks to recycle, or perhaps only to inventory the damaged collateral so manufacturers could restock accordingly. Luckily Amazon had refused to allow their employees leave before the storm broke into the warehouse, so they should be able to get that right out for you. It’s probably pretty good for business when a housing crisis topples the market but a new wave of homeless flood the FEMA tent, not that they’re not a complete joke but I ain’t got time for all that right now.
We somehow have to pack down a third lunch on top of two breakfasts, they feed us all we can eat at the park where we’re camped and in town there’s a church group on every corner struggling to find a free customer to pawn off another styrofoam contribution to the chaos.
Dawson Springs, this was the town on the news so this was where all the mainstream support landed, ten miles down the road the helpless had nothing. There were way more donations than volunteers, weeks spent sorting and moving and resorting the madness, some stuff much needed but much needed to have stayed at home. Goodwill bags from deep in the closet full of junk that even their owner hadn’t wanted, these people aren’t so hard up that they’re gonna want your dirty underwear, that’s even too gross for DJ. Thirty thousand tiny toothbrushes and thirty times that many across town, when town only claimed twenty-five hundred before the mass exodus and half of them probably didn’t even have teeth, it was Kentucky after all.
It took a ten person crew to keep up with the onslaught of too much, times thirty locations all inundated with a surplus of the same old stuff, that’s hundreds of helpers that could have been helping those neighbors down the road that still had nothing, yet overwhelmed donation centers diligently required
a local address for the handout of household goods certainly sent for the good of all tornado survivors, not just those who pay municipal tithes. And it was all the same old shit, desperately clinging onto nonsense for fear of scarcity, and yeah sure, everybody was traumatized and many had lost everything, but this was a total clusterfuck.
This phenomenon has a name even if the tornado didn’t, it’s called the Second Disaster, this unholy tidal wave of evil good-doers clearing their conscience and clutter with the same second thought as a broken town drowns in band-aids. We saw the same thing back at camp with a basketful of left side high heels in a poisoned blizzard standoff, but we coulda made the news so we had to look our best, and make sure you get my good side.
Most of the time these well-meaning organizations that gather supplies simply hire a trucking company to deliver the good word, a driver who has no sentimental desire for any relief other than his own pocket of debt, so when a jampacked distribution center runs out of free space for the widespread outpouring of the same five items and can no longer accept drop-offs, well our driver doesn’t want a truckload of left shoes, so he just adds them to the piles of collapsed capitalism already littering every street.
Or this one truck actually had the good goods, Carhartt jackets, Justin boots, Generac generators, all name brand new, a pretty thoughtful gift if all you have to offer is money, until he sold it all to a local businessman, should be able to make a killing off all this stolen merchandise as the driver double dips the emergency lane.
Not to discourage kind souls from answering the call of their hearts, but maybe a disclaimer of discarded negligence and canned goods, though ideally somebody somewhere could develop a central system of localized resource management so we can easily allocate our community support to whichever community is most in need regardless of paying the dollar bill, you know, like communityism might do.
*******
“Alright Groucho,” she said, “We already had enough heat on us to be going around scaring up your revolution and all that, at least by the time you got there we had refunded the police, oh and there was that infiltrator guy, proud boy guy, all walkie-talkied and tucked-in and tried to turn us in for being anti-fascist looters, and DJ was rolling cigarettes and he tried to say they were joints, I wish, had the cops come to the volunteer headquarters and everything, but they already loved us there because obviously, plus we brought back a purse full of prescriptions so we couldn’t be that bad, so then they run that guy off but he’s been tracking us and knows where we’re camped and Nutmeg was all excited because it was her first infiltrator and making contingency plans and she wasn’t at Standing Rock but wanted to be and was going to another winter pipeline camp after this or something and it was just a big old day for her. Me and DJ didn’t even blink.
And then DJ ended up staying for like three months and being one of the main volunteers down there, helping that one girl who was running for county someth’n-or-nother, she had it going on. Right after the tornado hit a lot of locals jumped up eager to help, so there’s a hundred people ready to dig in and sweep houses for neighbors in trouble, but all the official channels and government tape dispensers had stalled around for two hours, so she said ‘Fuck that’ and grabbed a clipboard and got everyone moving, and by the time we got there they already had a church basement and paperwork with snacks and a big commercial coffeepot, so you know where we were coming everyday.
And then we were staying at Pennyrile State Park where they were housing a lot of the displaced residents, schmoozed with the governor and forest rangers as we sorted an overload of donations and cheap Christmas toys, stretched out by the fireplace in the lodge playing cards with some National Guard kids, fully armed and all of nineteen, ready to draw if DJ tried any funny business but don’t think they quite understood how severely our teams had faced off not that long ago.
And then we got sick, well I got sick and gave it to them, the big C, so you know DJ made us eat a bunch of onions and garlic and turmeric and all that healthy shit, yuck, then they tried to give me grief about not drinking water and only pop, so I said, ‘Well hell, I’ve outlived both you hadn’t I?’”
*******
Ah, sweet young Nutmeg, I think she’s a full-on covert op now, farther off the grid than DJ, only communicates through encrypted pigeons. Grapevine has it she might swing through this part of the country soon, wonder if she’ll be heading to Weelaunee Forest. That’s where that Stop Cop City protest is in Atlanta, cutting down eighty acres of old growth to build an urban warfare training compound for the militarized police state, a big mock city for riot control practice and the whole nine-one-one, looks like they’re starting to get scared of the power in the people.
They’ve been at that camp over a year, hoisted into trees and quite successful at progressing delay until reinforcements get called in, the Forest Defenders they call themselves, still smell like Water Protectors to me. But so get this, they raided the camp the other day with live ammunition, a long burst of opened fire rang out as they shot Tortugita over fifty times, claimed they were shot at first but limited body cams suggest it was their own unfriendly fire and now a recently released autopsy shows Tort was sitting cross-legged with their hands in the air, assumed to be in a meditative prayer position which the government has always been the most terrified of. They’re killing our people.
By all accounts the most caring vessel of love, we know the type, an outspoken member of the movement willing to be interviewed and risk repercussion grenades, still sitting in the tent peacefully as a dedicated proponent to the importance of nonviolence in our current social justice movement. Most on the ground believe it was a targeted political assassination, it’s hard not too.
They’re stepping up the tactics they tried back at camp, so much so that they’re building an entire hunting ground to get ready, plus they get to play the bonus round of rounding up the forest before construction’s even begun. All right near a bunch of low-income black neighborhoods of course, in a city that’s voted against it, in a state that’s seen political upheaval and a metropolis of civil activism that could be construed as beneficial to squash down. We saw the strength of overarmed pitch they presented as defense council for the oil company, so just imagine what they will be willing to do now that they’re representing themselves. They’re murdering our people.
We’ve got a Water Protector friend who’s been a part of that chapter of the movement since it first ramped up, mailed DJ a registration card but he was three feet deep in dirt, funny how his orbit dropped him off here during the same week the escalators got installed. So yeah, I don’t know, we’ll see how it all works out, I guess it depends on if he needs a stronger ending for this book. I didn’t even know he was coming here until the day before he did, I’m pretty used to being on a moment’s notice but his moments are a lot more nower than mine.
*******
Yup. I sure didn’t know I’d be doing tornado work, didn’t seem like my cup of coffee but they kept it flowing and day by day it kept feeling like the right place to be. Hanging out at Pennyrile with the community allowed me to connect with so many folks who needed to know that people like us are out there, they had definitely never seen anybody like me in their neck of the woods, some kind of hardworking hippie that rides a feather in the wind, nope, haven’t seen him, but could you give him this green granola from donations, ain’t none of us gonna eat this shit.
That’s not quite how it works for me though, I’m not on a free-for-all of deforested gumption, I may let the wind carry me but the trick is learning how to steer. Like this tornado, I wouldn’t have wanted to be caught up in that, spun around in
endless circles, chewed up and spit out hundreds of miles away where they found surviving photos of missing persons. I have an anchor to keep me steady through the storm, not a weight on my heart but a tether to the destination, my Sun Dance commitment doesn’t hold me back from exploring the world, it fills me with light to delve deeper than I ever could have on my own.
The tornado didn’t know where it was headed either, meandering more than I do as it bounced between bumpers and took a turn towards town, managed to knock down three of the four government housing units which Mayor Maynott might flip into revitalized condos with all the publicity the city’s been getting lately. Conspiratorial music theories of a HAARP-played anthem aside, the upfront is bad enough as weather patterns push tornado alley into the gutter and I respectfully abstain from the low-hanging fruit that no longer finds itself in Kansas.
It’s best to learn how to walk in a good way before you try storm chasing. And there’s nothing wrong with walking, I still end up doing it a good bit, and what better way is there to be fully present with every step of Earthbound connection. You get a real understanding of the delicate world that engulfs you, a close-up feel for where you are at and where you are going, milestones on the horizon slowly grow closer as you discover your own inner propulsion.
So now imagine you are riding on a horse, a real nice one, named Chocolate Feather or something protohippie like that.
This horse is pure animal instinct that can make or break your survival, so it is good to rely on them like that, but if you are ever going to move beyond basic survival you will have to grab the reins yourself and find your own destiny. It is not about fighting against nature and forcibly overcoming her, this is a symbiotic partnership as your increased perspective connects with the pulling tide of a lakeside oasis.
T he lake is cool and all, plenty of passengers never even leave the stagnated puddle, recreation distracts the weekend warrior from ever questioning the dam, but those that are
ready will climb past whatever blockage is holding them back and jump head first into the flow.
So now you’re flailing and butt-naked in the river, don’t ask me why, but you can earn yourself upgrades like a wetsuit or a lifeboat or maybe those little floatie things. You can empower yourself with the tools and conditioning to have an awesome time, but you still have to roll with the current events, it would be foolish to fight an uphill battle unless you were Ghandi in a speedboat. Now that still leaves plenty of wiggle room to make it your own, paddle around a bit and set your own pace as you take in whichever sights call to you, it’s even okay if you get tied up in an eddy for longer than you expected, just keep wiggling and eventually the stream will pick you back up.
It might start to feel like you’re almost getting somewhere, finally figured it all out as the waterfall rapidly approaches, opening the last door to the next unknown as you only find yourself merging with a bigger burst of water, now even more flow and a wider depth of experience, maybe a little daunting for the newfound minnows but so worth it.
Then as you feel your way through the nested levels of fated freedom you suddenly arrive at the edge of the beginning, a borderless expanse of infinite potential, your resolve your sail, cast it into the breeze with full confidence that it’s headed the right way, all while trusting in your accumulated ability to catch hold of the flow and guide yourself to wherever you’re headed next.
It’s not about going where the wind wants, it’s about harnessing the wind to go wherever you want. Don’t be the feather, be the bird. Bird is the word.
“How’d you like that one bud?” I said with a wink.
*******
I fucking hate this guy.
*******
“Would you two quit flirting about disaster already? Now where was I? Oh yeah, so while he’s sitting there telling us all this the phone rings, and he’s on the night shift, which usually means that he brings a pillow, clocks in and clocks out, sleeps a recommended eight hours and has the day to himself, and the cats, but our crew has its own gravity that won’t let him go and all these other ones are standing around sucked into watching him tell it with such enthusiasm and then the phone rings.
It’s somebody from the campground, from one of the RVs the governor got for the survivors of the press conference, and normally he’s out cold and stumbling for the snooze button but he’s all amped up and feeling a bit snarky, and he has an audience, and he’s pretty sure it’s one of the cooks on the line,
‘The Pentecostal tickler of tongues and tastebuds,’ his words not mine, so she says ‘Hey Bill, I’ve got a problem, I’m out of toilet paper.’
He of course repeats the introductory statement to apprise everyone who’s there in the first person, ‘You’re out of toilet paper?' he asked, his smirk collecting the attention of his entourage, ‘Um, well, I can’t really leave the lodge unattended,’ he said, knowing full well that she knows full well that he only sleeps through the night, ‘How about the ranger?’ she pleads amid a far worse inkblot than when this whole thing began, but the ranger’s nowhere to be found, likely in his office asleep, or in the patrol truck asleep, or eaten by cats.
‘Bill, what am I supposed to do?' she asked, out of options and willing to put the topic up for discussion among a panel of peers, backdoor hopes holding out that he’ll just get off his ass so she can get off hers, and then DJ mumbles in with something about using a poo knife, but I can’t remember exactly what he said,” she said.
“I didn’t say anything,” says DJ, “I wasn’t even there, I was down the hall helping Eric and Sammie, some of them ones who had lived in the low-income housing, poor health before and rolling downhill since, all I really did was hang out but that’s half of what disaster relief is all about.”
“Well I wasn’t there,” she said, “I was still back home being sick, so where the hell’d this story come from then?”
“From that one guy, the one who’s always doing pretty good for an old fat man. I come back from their room and everybody’s all jacked up and laughing, ‘Hey Hippie, where the hell have you been?’ he asks, ‘You just missed the best one ever. ’ So I say ‘I’ve been down at Sammie’s, why what happened?’ He says ‘We were sitting here talking about Bill and the cats, and then the phone rings, it’s the tongue tickler and she’s out of toilet paper up at the campground.’
' Holaaay,’ I say and plead for the punchline, ‘So then I say ‘You’re out of toilet paper?’ ’ Bill says. ‘ It was perfect Hippie, he said ‘Well, I can’t leave the lodge,’ knowing full well that we coulda watched the place, and knowing that she knew that, and that she knew that he knew that, and then somehow he pulls together a straight face and offers one last preposterance, ‘Well, I don’t know what to tell you, are you wearing socks?’ he said,’ he said,” DJ said.
“Oh yeah,” she said, “That does makes sense now, good one.”
*******
I give up. Do whatever you want. Just leave me out of it. I don’t want any credit for whatever it is this is. Of course he’d be the third person we’d expect to see here, why wouldn’t he be, mister humble servant takes on as many roles as he can make fit. I mean, obviously the Bill thing is hilarious, don’t get me wrong about that, but all this he said she said bullshit is getting out of hand. Ain’t nobody got time for all this hearsay when brevity’s already his downfall. I never understood how a book could be too wordy for one’s taste, a literal concoction of letters and language, though I now see the oxymoronic quality of the unwordy considered novel.
Isn’t this supposed to be a book about helping people?
They just went through the worst experience of their life and we’re sitting around laughing at potty humor, don’t you think
you owe it to these folks to take their struggle a little more seriously?
Like the old fat man, whatever his name was, he’d been outside watching the storm roll in with the same invincibility he’d always been afforded, until the half mile wide whirlwind blew the final warning. His wife flung the frames from the hallway walls where his eight month pregnant daughter was already crouched, he corralled them in as his gut dropped, figuratively, otherwise it woulda smashed them before the tornado as he crouched over and held onto his dear lives. He felt the entire house lift up eight inches, felt his family unit lift up another eight, prayed a solemn prayer of self-sacrifice and instantly fell back to Earth, his big-voiced ego visibly shaken by a home intruder he couldn’t shoot.
Or the Horse Lady, he hasn’t even mentioned her, among the second wave of park residents as the hospital’s waiting room immaturely discharged. “All sass and no class,” she said her daddy would always say, fuck, not me too.
Her and her somewhat live-in somewhat boyfriend had been sitting in her old farmhouse horsing around or whatever, storm took that sharp left towards town and sucked her right out the back wall, whipped her all the way around the house which then came off its foundation and flipped back over top of her. Punctured lung, ruptured spleen, banged up head and bruised up everything else, halfway couldn’t figure if she was suffering a concussion or if she was always this nutty. Broke the horses, leveled the ranch, pinned her gentleman beneath the great big oak two hundred yards away, took four hours to clear the roads of debris, she finally made it to the hospital just in time, he didn’t.
So that was DJ’s first chainsaw job, to cut up that tree so she wouldn’t have to look at it every time she tried to pick up the pieces strewn about her childhood memories. Of course he’ll do it, you’ll find no monster at the end of this book, and like always an unlikely friendship swells between them, plus she took him out for brunch.
But don’t think it was the first chainsawing of the winter, we’d already been downing halfway there trees all over the
place, well my wife had anyway. Yeah I’m married, not everybody shreds every stray thought they have into pulp fiction, but now that I see where this one’s going I’ll do her the favor of leaving her name out of it, we can just call her Chainsaw Jane.
And then there was Cowboy, an alias so fitted that I couldn’t begin to rephrase him, luckily it’s one as worn out as his old hat, so you either know him or you don’t, if you do you love him and if you don’t then you soon will. Opposite side of whatever aisle DJ got lost in but pretty much on the exact same mission, a bit older so more talk and less action, which fit the sequence of events where it was time to shut up and do something. From his truck’s passenger window the tent shook with the shrill of a nagging neighbor, “North Carolina, it’s time to get to work.”
*******
Oh yeah, forgot about that, about there being no room for comedy among the aftermath of a tragic unfolding, you should just crumble these pages back into a swan and remind it of the ugly times. Not you, I mean the you that is him reading from down there, the you that is you definitely shouldn’t tamper with these self-destructive timelines, that would be an even bigger waste of paper, although no one seems to notice the Amazon trade-off currently clogging our airways.
Other people’s personalities are the only thing that kept me there as long as I was, small town webs twisted inside themselves and sometimes a little too close for comfort, often I find myself a fixture of clandestine unloading as recent strangers divulge the most vulnerable of personal information.
This place was even more like that than normal, kinda like the rez, everybody had been through this shared trauma and had the same baseline to grieve from. All of their individual angles filled the lodge with a mosaic that though difficult to bear witness to was ultimately rewarding to take in.
It’s not unlike the rest of the universe, imagine for a moment that all we are is some Alan Watts lightbulb floating
in empty space, everything lit up and obviously awesome, but there’s little contrast or subtle nuance of flavor, everything that is is just all so super awesome, imagine that, I’m sure you can if you try, you’ve been rather capable of imagining that you’ve enjoyed this so far or that it will be over soon, both far more unlikely than the great cosmic idea lost in thought.
This divine projection unknowable due to unsurpassed brilliance, I get it, only able to even look at itself through a polarized filmstrip at the universal studios dreamtheater. A unique kaleidoscope starcrafted by the astrologic pulling of nanoscopic minerals suspended in primarily water molecules composed of atoms composed of primarily empty space. A holographic mirage for a waterfall of infinite light to play with its own rainbow of emotions.
But if they’re this all-seeing projectionist who could do anything they want anywhere in the world across all of time, then what would they want with little old me? And why would they want me to suffer like this? What kind of tyrant could put me through the struggle just for their own entertainment?
Well they probably didn’t start with you, no offense, but how interesting could your life be if you’re getting lost in mine? I’m sure they jumped right into sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, or a thumping soundtrack for thwacking fantastic beasts and riding them into volcanic sunsets. There’s an untold amount of epic stories told throughout the pages of things we thought up, so just imagine what their imagination is capable of.
But as we all know, the same old plot devices get a little too predictable after a while, so night after night each hundred year dream takes on a little less self-awareness and lets itself believe that the dream is all that exists, giving itself over to the roller coaster of deep-seated fears and fantasies, and if every scene was as fluffed as a lifetime love story then would any of it even mean anything at all? Besides, it could always be worse, you could find yourself as a side-character of a subplot in one of my corkscrew comedies.
An infinite selection of mindblowers suggests an infinite selection of emotional content, much of it unpleasant from the
character’s perspective but likely a crucial aspect of the grand scheme, and eventually as this interdimensional librarian flips through the books it’s only statistically inevitable that they’ll run across this very one that you’re reading now, and maybe if you keep reading I’ll find another one of us at the end of this monstrosity.