Saturday, January 07, 2006

Week 1: The Wolf Has Emerged

So these two gentlemen approach. I'm in the laundromat reading the lastest edition of The New Yorker, a great piece on emergent property and the intelligence of organized ant colonies, my scuffed up, obsidian Pumas left to swim in a puddle of detergent and dryer sheets. These cats look real nice, seem real nice, even though they spend hours peddling around trying to convert folks just as the past religious, mass conversion by Catholics and their quest for world, theological domination. Martin Luther nailed a revolution to a door, but I burned it to a pile of smoldering ashes.

Must be doing their missionary work, riding those silly bikes with the cold, black & white, name tags, carefully inscribed by some manufacturer in the midwest, where bigomy isn't allowed but everyone sleeps with everyone else's own sister or first cousin. .

"Good evening, sir."

Insert song: Silence, something bout silence makes me sick. rage man, rage. I stay silent, the last fragments of thought about to roll onto the next page. All I want to do is finish the rest of the paragraph on the other page, then I'll deal with these clowns.

"Have you heard of the Church of Latter-Day Saints?"

Fucking A, I'm almost done with this page, this is wrapping up the research on how this may be applicable to modern day business models, how to gather the most intelligent idea from groups, rather than the single most intelligent person working in the open window office in the next room over.

So I finally acknowledge their presence. Looking up, it seems they are as glazed over as the donuts at the local 7-eleven. You know it, the Krispy Kreme's left in the wintery freeze of Atkins, no longer touched, or eaten for that matter. These glossy donuts now relegated to melt for days in a make-shift oven while these guys sweat it out over this incredibly, out of the ordinary hot San Francisco January.

I say, "Do I look like a sheep?"

And they say, "Excuse me, sir."

And I say, "Do I look like a sheep, man?

They say, "Well no, you look like a man we'd like to talk to about the Book of Morman."

And I say quite frankly, "For a second there, I thought you had me for a sheep. 'Cause if you didn't know it, I'm a fucking wolf. I eat people like you whole, like a snake . . . slow and with precision. You know me as I'm the same good ole boy prophet you idolize, just like a Pope, man. You spend hours and hours trying to figure out who I am, how wonderful I can be, because that's what you want to know: How to think up here, in your head," I motion to my head and its slicked back hair, the rims of my glasses glossed over by hair product. "See there's more to God than praying or faith or any of that other voodoo you pass onto the masses. See, it is to know God not through some story, to know God not through the rigor of rules and regulations laid down thousands of years ago by a culture who solely needed these rules for self preservation, for cultural preservation, but to know God by unraveling the mystery before you. Man, you follow the bouncing ball across the street bc you are told to, but I realize there may be traffic, I stop. Self preservation, and I see the trap. But you two? You're left to blink aimlessly as you drift into a coma and sleep, in a daze trying SO hard to learn what I want to know . . . but you claim to know:

Is there a heaven? And if so, will I go there? And if I do, will I learn how absurd it is that you think there's a place set aside there for you, like the fucking Beverly Hills Motel. As if God tagged you, as if in a mountain of souls beckoning through the tunnel of light each second, he knows who followed Jesus, Buddha, etc. You're ridiculous, man. Now let me do my laundy. And next time, identify your prey before you realize that he is the predator."

They don't say a word. And I finish my paragraph and my dryer buzzes and the frigid wind blows their rejected hair as they step out, step out of the door and into a world that could be a glimpse of what heaven is like. A stage where the players, in robotic fashion, unravel a world that created them.

And I chuckle to myself, while the old lady next to me pushes off the bench and quickly vacates the premises, her old puss soured by my obvious, irrational response to the fine, well dressed gentlemen. As she struggles to carry her laundry, I carefully set my magazine down, avoiding any opportunity for its pages to be wrinkled, and whisk my way outside as her basket thumps to the ground.

"Let me help you."

Just like that, I help her to her car and lift it into the trunk. She looks destitute, and I slip a hundred into the basket. She is gracious and not as frightened.

I look up to the sky, "Are we even?"

She closes her door. There's this strange muttering and I turn thinking its the vagrant from half and hour ago, but it's her boat size, white Lincoln starting and then reversing like a stuttering 1st grader.

I watch her retreat and I mosey on inside the Coin-O-Matic laundromat to continue reading my wonderful article on emergence.


Geppetto sighs, interesting, finds the following etched into his bench:

He reveals the stage
set up on the pages
of his 1967 almanac
it says here,

"the attack of the killer seas are
crumbling the sea shores into
pieces of shark teeth and sea shells
all there for the taking like a
spiraling parachute into a blinding sunspot."

the only thought
going through his mind
is:

I got to get there somehow
someway
or no how

to meet an end who
will show me a means
to this purpose which
is not to propose
but to impose one's will
while the open faced palms
of the hands of God
on his right hand, there extended,
is the entrance to the valley of death
a sand storm, no longer born from
the movement of the heavens
but from the movement of the tumultuous
truculant bee hive mind,
a whirling windmill of honey &
milk mixed into the drooling blood
of the lamb with its eyes in the corner
speculating
about the afterlife
now found in his bleached socks
and mashed corn meal
reveals a brooding light
as bright as the instant
he was born, a tiny, vulnerable babe
whose whole life was revealed
before him

and, as with all newborns,

he wept . . .
he screamed . . .
he suckled.

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