THE ROCK
“Siri!” said Charles, getting directions as we drove through Melinda's estate. A ribbon of lights on highway 17 snaking down the hill towards Los Gatos, and the rock faded.
No doubt about that rock, the size of a tent in a homeless camp. It had been hauled to the entry of the building materials yard in Santa Cruz by a fairly large loader. The fuel burned would have seemed unremarkable sixty or seventy years ago. It's a fitting reminder.
Dour dusk over the mountains and a red tinged glow of rain clouds giving birth to baby rain drops. There was some impatient need for a narrative to capture not just the mood, but a sense of the howling world order discovered at Merrill Lynch.
The office on Stevens Creek in Sunnyvale looked more like a hamburger joint than an epitome of financial services. The check-in counter was unattended. People drifting in and out were not dressed for success, in suits and ties, but looked liked they had slept in their clothes. Behind the counter, past a field of carpet, was the tiled area in front of a row of teller's windows, now boarded shut. Fiber ceiling tiles were hanging down, threatening a collapse into statements threatening North Korea with fire and fury.
My visitors from North Carolina questioned the relevance of a Pruneridge sign towering over the shopping complex, which had been an orchard in the days of hand push mowers. Pedestrians rushing by under a sky streaked with contrails and patches of dark clouds were hunched over cell phones, absorbed in a world without newspapers, in virtual reality simulations, apps for keeping track of countless foot steps, heart beats, perspiration, unnamed medical conditions, the vast morass of political propaganda, ads for insurance, tooth brushes, incontinence diapers, distractions from the climate changing faster than originally feared.
Except for a few riots and protests, mass murders, free lance terrorism, it might be called the American Dream. But don't loudly mention male sexist groping pigs because this might be politically unacceptable, depending on the latest tweets. Isn't it wonderful how Twitter has doubled the number of permissible characters?
No use trying to break dance it, or dial it back to horse ranch brilliant afternoons with Palomino manes silking the breeze. Those railroad hobo days, when for the employed a day was eight hours of work. Swimming an unpolluted river, suit hung out on a branch, a Tandem Computer butterfly with stock options for toilet paper.
All the past getting sucked out, leaving just a few lonely dark trees, not planning a return to saxophone solos any more than pen craftsmanship outlives a parrot on top of its cage, making the mildest of rocking waves for baby with a grand view from the corner office. Or from the International Space Station in its infancy, warp drive developments there already dreaming of fusion power.
Prune pickers did imagine this, playing harmonica in non-unionized evenings of the healing machine, strung together with bits of wire, beer can tabs, salvaged red bits of plastic. Unimaginable, the machine calling itself Artificial Intelligence with its unblinking ruby eye, picking nose at dad's creation, the ATM a stand up comic sneering down masked robbers when all it needed was a skimmer planted at the Valero station. It has metastasized. At Seven Eleven people wait in line for tickets, places in the DMV line where enhanced IDs will be issued to physical providers of further details. All for a guaranteed purpose. To detect terrorists in rapid order at airport security. To shore up the national debt. It all comes together in funds for cleaning oil spill birds, clearing melted plastic off the burnt homes in Santa Rosa where Governor Brown visited to say don't call it zeit geist.
Word smiths inherit Lego blocks to entrain boxcars with beginnings and endings, all labeled, coupling up together. There they go.
Over a cliff proclaimed by the Flat Earth Society, legs dangling over the abyss.
If only we had known . . . ah . . .
The rate of computation increases exponentially yet cannot keep pace with an ice cube dropped accidentally. The butterfly effect, regrettably from a scientific view, merges with oroboros.
We will stop climate change, won't we? or be eliminated. So presuming we set it back 50 or 100 years, we get paradise?
Have we ever? No no, olly olly oxen free. Oooo Universe!
We did this while getting uploaded to a cloud that will last for awhile.
Here in Silicon Valley. We wrestle with China and Russia, right on through to Belgium, Ukraine, Hawaii, name it. Shiny towers glisten, all the conference rooms, meetings, share holders, drug gangs, parolees, tunnels, mules. The President's beautiful wall will catch photo-op stuff. Artwork of a tagger's mural wall won't appear in the desert, or at the last road runner's gas station where electric cars win, fueled by the sun, hallelujah! Praise the sun.
There is trepidation when stepping off over the abyss, where the Society forgot fire escape ladders, and a laughing clown visible only in a mirror held up while snapping a selfie.
Lego words that go together well, looking back at something as familiar as the covered bridge in Felton, not all that far from Santa Cruz, darkly overhung with trees.
It slips away.
All those years ago, to have finished with cigars, tobacco, dope, psilocybin, LSD, booze. Not that these have anything much to do with it any more than, say, an impulse sprinkler. Or time, keyed to the sun's regular disappearance. The myth of Horus becomes a fading amusement. Better let the attention take in everything at once. It's a breeze in the clown's hair through a palomino's mane.
And do not confuse the Pied Piper's retinue, of which there are celebrators, a few. Or deny the heedless corruption of rule by torture, imprisonment, all wrapped in a cruel habitus we might do without
The dour dusk of unforeseen, unforeseeable consequences, rains down, sold by impostors for a song on the journey of human suffering, holding out a clutch of dreams that seemed so real, until vanishing.
Colors of fall are distilled liquid amber leaves. Their depths are home to miniature insect explorations. The inconceivable vastness of all that is and is not, encompassed in seeds of the spotted spurge, pulled routinely by gardeners. Thermonuclear fools would accelerate their process, which is already established in our sun. There are always weeds. And gardeners.
In spite of stumbling blocks or a large rock, life goes on. Charles and Denise have a long return trip to North Carolina. We say our goodbyes and hug at the curb. “Siri!”
They disappear.
