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Jack on the Train

Miles disappear into miles.  Bakersfield still nearly a day away.  Jack settles into his comfortable lounge chair and watches the great Central Valley tell its story through the frame of the train window. 

            Central Valley is a man-made farm oasis.  Before the 1930’s the Central Valley was desert .  Then the Hearst, Bechtal and other wealthy California aristocratic families designed a massive desert farm.  They piped in precious water by the riverful and filled these lowlands with massive stretches of mono cropped fields.  Hundreds of thousands of acres planted in perfect straight rows   sprawl outward in all directions.  Fields of grapes, soybeans, and olives.  Every row of plants or trees paralleled by a row of snaking irrigation hose or a trench carrying precious life-giving water redirected from its natural flow.  

            Olive tree plantations drone on endless out the window.  The older olive trees defy their perfect rows with gnarled branches that reach longingly one way or the other toward some distance only they understand.  Their bark bunches and lumps with anti-geometric messiness.   The trees live in columns of productivity, raised only to produce, yet they express themselves as individual trees, each a work of its own creation. 

            The trees grow only with others of their same age; saplings with saplings, elders with elders for 1000s of acres.  The parent trees know nothing of their progeny and young shoots know nothing of their heritage, and niether know anything of other species, for no shrub or bunch-grass or strange breed of tree is allowed to compete or inter-mingle with the olive cash crops.  Below their outstretched and welcoming branches  the ground is barren of life…merely the sterile gray of dirt poisoned into submission.

            Some trees choose to die before the whole plantation is burned down to replant with younger more productive strains.  The dead olive trees leave brown skeletons dotting the rows: defiance of the blueprint perfection so carefully laid out and tended by savvy olive tree productivity technicians.

            Like these olive trees, muses Jack, people too can live lives of productive precision.  We can live with our offspring raised by strangers in nurseries.  We can live without knowing our grandparents and grandchildren.  We can live in a barren desert, on redirected water. We can live cut off from other species of plants and animals or stranger, different humans.  We can live without knowing or understanding our caretakers and managers and achieve their purposes.  We humans can live as domestics raised in a planned community where our individuality seems macabre and ugly.  Yes, muses Jack, we can live that way.    

            The monotony of train clickity-clacking along with unstoppable regularity soothes and lulls Jack. His eyes close to the fields outside his window.  Fields that may not even be real on the other side of the window.  Behind his eyelids the olive trees can speak to each other and they are saying: “They aren’t real.”  Listening to what the olive trees are saying, trying to understand what they mean, Jack eventually nods off into sleep, his ear against the window of the train.

Jack on the Bus
Chapter XX
Rocking and jostling to the motion of the bus, Jack reads from a novel: “Winston turned around abruptly.” The words bounce with the bus, but he persists in reading, “He set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen.“
Though reading word by word, Jack overhears conversations all around him. He sits against the wall of the bus while a young man with a gentle demeanor sits on his left in the aisle seat. The youth’s slightly raspy and halting voice betrays a wryness perhaps even some fear or anxiety. Another young man sits in front of Jack at a 90 degree angle because his seat is designed to face the aisle. Soon Jack discovers he is 18. Both of the youths graze Jack lightly with their extremities. The guy to the left allows his leg to casually remain in contact with Jack’s leg and the guy in front of him, whose long hair and smooth youthful skin contrast slightly with his confident and full voice, rested his elbow on Jack’s left leg. In that way the three of them all formed a confirmation of humanity, of flesh and blood. The contact was perhaps intimate, but by no means flirtatious or “gay.” Jack couldn’t help but feel joy at the contact, at the confirmation that he was not an entirely awful human and that he was among not entirely awful humans.
The jumbling words of the novel before him continued:
“The thing he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws) but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punishable by death…“
Jack hears the confident voice of the long haired youth say, “Oregon is like Texas, nothing but steers and queers there.”
His friend with olive skin, apparently of latin american decent yet fully acculturated into the American way (sickness…?) asks, “What’s a steer?”
“I don’t know. A cowboy or something.”
Involuntarily, as if suddenly shocked by a prod, Jack’s head jerks up and he says, “A steer is not a cowboy. A steer is a castrated male cow.”
“A what?”
“A steer…look I’m from Montana that’s how I know…a steer is a cow that would’ve been a bull if it hadn’t been caster…er…had its balls chopped off.” he says, trying to be as understandable as possible.
“oh” says the youth, unimpressed with the technicality.
But Jack presses on anyway, encouraged by nearly imperceptible nudges on his leg.
“So whats wrong with Oregon?” asks Jack.
“There’s just not much there. I mean, well, I was in Ashland. That town…Jeez, its jus’ a bunch of hippies! Its like the haight-ashbury but a whole town of them.” Says the long-haired youth gesturing through the air with his long fingers.
“Don’t they hold some sort of Renaissance Fair there?” Jack asks.
“Yea, all those people get all dressed up like they are in Shakespeare and talk with English accents.” He’s on the verge of laughter, his smile beaming at the recollection. The whole of the back of the bus tunes into his story, his gestures, and his face. “I mean you get some skater kid with punked red hair dressed up in Roman Garb talking with a British Accent and thinking he can speak Shakespearian! Jeez dude what are you Julius Caesar?”
“Sounds like fun to me” Jack replies. Ah, the liberation of life-experience, no longer does Jack fear being on the side of the ridiculed.
“Well if you’re stoned its great.” He says.
“Sounds like a stoner kinda place.”
“Yea man, they are all hippies.” He says ‘hippies’ as a derogatory term. Then long-hair says, “If I had a suit of armor I’d wear it everywhere. I’d carry a gladius!”
And so they talked for several minutes like that. Others on the bus were drawn into their interaction, attracted by the jocularity and easiness of the conversation.
“I grew up in San Francisco,” recites the long-hair, “then, when I was 15, we moved to Ashland. I was there for three years. Now I’m back here–gonna get a 9-5 job and go to school…” His voice trailed off ever so slightly, a hint of doubt, or uncertainty Jack wondered.
“There are a lot of jobs here.” Jack says supportively. “Especially if you know computers. Otherwise they’ll send you to the mail room!”
A third young man, in his early 20s, wearing business casual dress and sporting a lazy, rolling look sitting on the far side of long-hair snorted, and looked at Jack. Noticing his suddenly piqued interest Jack surmised the young man worked in a mail room. So Jack says with all sincerity, “That’s not a bad job at all.”
So Jack says with all sincerity, “That’s not a bad job at all.”
The mail room youth rolls his head lazy-like in affirmation, “Naw man, $20 an hour for not much work and the internet all day long.”
Again, supportively, Jack says, “Ah the Internet! what was the office like before the internet!”
“It must’ve been primitive.” chimes in long hair. After a short pause he says, “But all these corporations are destroying the environment and enslaving people.”
“I agree.” Jack says, “But it can’t last and everyone knows it. I used to get all worked up about it, now I realize its going to have to run its course.”
Wistfully long hair responds, “Me too.”
Moments later the two youths’ stop arrives: Haight-Ashbury. They leave, they bidding Jack fare-thee-wells–fellow strangers in a strange land.
With a slight sigh and small smile Jack returns to his novel and reads:
“He dipped his pen into the ink and then faltered for just a second. A tremor had gone through his bowels. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:
April 4th, 1984
“He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him…”

Ten Years Pass
(written in 2000, San Francisco)

For a decade I search the nation
Letting my youthful heart guide me
Coast to coat I roam
Lonely
Following my terrible angel

Ten Years Pass
Odysseus is lost at sea
Burroughs is in Tangiers
And I am away from the Forest

A decade I follow the terrible angel,
Through the House of a Million Mirrors
Near the Isle of Infinite Lies
Under the Body of Diseased Lust
Above the Darkness
Below the LIght
Everywhere, always obscuring the Hopeful Object from Sight

Ten Years Pass
Odysseus is lost at sea
Burroughs is in Tangiers
And I am away from the Forest

Terrible Angel,
Casting my eyes upon every city
Through every neighborhood
Into each day
We work hard for coin
With hearts full of fears
Fears of job-loss
Of love-loss
Of reputation-loss
Of hair-loss
Of looks-loss
Of life lost
Of the losses real and imagined,
Relevant and Irrelevant

Ten Years Pass
Odysseus is lost at sea
Burroughs is in Tangiers
And I am away from the Forest

Floating through darkened streets
I hear faint whispers:
Stories heard and told
by portion and by piece
Reminiscing
Of days of old
When men begat men
When women birthed women
When youth emboldened old age
When humanity loved its Nature
Eh, let the by-gones be by-gones
EMBRACE THE BLOODY REGANOMIC DOLLAR!

Ten Years Pass
Odysseus is lost at sea
Burroughs is in Tangiers
And I am away from the Forest

The terrible angel shrieks war cries among the people:
Jail the drugged-out junkies!
Bomb the oil-hogging rag-heads!
Censor violent and sexual sincerity!
Poison the disease-ridden libertines!

Ten Years Pass
Odysseus is lost at sea
Burroughs is in Tangiers
And I am away from the Forest

Age and Time grind on
Cheeks once downy, now sticky with hair
Maturing, fading, evolving, dying.
Time heals, time teaches, time will kill us all!

The golden age eludes my youth,
The terrible angel all the more terrible
The New World Order is in my mind
I must speak to the King!

Ten Years Pass
Odysseus is lost at sea
Burroughs is in Tangiers
And I am away from Home