FLYING CIRCUS

and so next day

in the sidetalk thornbush

revolution

Here's my stunt: I'm OK, you're OK.

It's a barnstormer over-exaggeration to clear the air, a reminder of the sweet acrid smell of NRA rifle practice at our mountain school for boys, where we lived in an imitation Pueblo. From over the hill, somewhere in Nevada, one night we watched a brief eerie glow. An A-bomb test, we were told. Prof warned us not to smoke cigarettes, and not to drink coffee. The whole thing was low-key, a sublimated hunter patriotic preparation thing never really discussed in 1952.

My stunt replicates a crop duster pilot dropping news reel bombs on pop corn munchers. I never did really get it then, but eventually the lights come up. Everyone goes back to something normal. Playing marbles. Sneaking a smoke. Faking an English test. Which all seemed like getting a cattle car loaded, if there'd been one to watch up there on Bear Creek Road.

Just another world that I wondered if anyone else could really see, or admit to it if they had. It's a serious secret right out in plain sight. Works its way through everything invisibly, so it seems, and comes up saying I'm OK, you're OK. As though anyone really knows any better. But I couldn't agree less.

So it's just in that sense, saying this comfort. A word everyone knows and probably thinks everyone agrees. But it won't do. But it will have to do because, just because . . .

The days of accommodation are over. Enduring the NRA 'perfume' was an adaptation, deep cover for a revulsion that would maybe have escaped, screaming, if I'd had the details of what it actually meant. It's supposed to be OK to use them to kill things, more than just how calm you can get to hit that bull's eye. It never occurred to me, then damn, the literal meaning of it. But it was just a couple of shades removed from hunting on the great plains, a buffalocide mass murder. Bull's eyes bleeding off a cliff of dreams, sweet acrid smell of death.

So I'm storming, like a death duster, block buster, bunker buster rattling all the cages that nice, normal people build for each other, and buffalo and friends and enemies alike in some kind of communal understanding that neglects what I do not. Never did. And now it's OK not to, giving it a slightly different meaning.

It doesn't matter if you're OK or not. I am. And that's what matters. And after all this block buster stuff, since I'm making this as I go along, it's no big deal, not nearly as big as wiping out the herds and millions of fellow humans in wars that have, admittedly, gotten smaller since incinerating so many Japanese with just two modern bombs. Which has given us pause, so far, about maybe incinerating the whole shebang. Man, what a pun!

OK is not doing that anymore. You know? Your sweet acrid smoke! Your thermogeddon! OK is just what it's always been, and that's pretty quiet. Who else ever cared, up there in our Pueblo haven, to just sit in the forest and listen to the birds? We were supposed to be rancher dudes. Or something. Then we graduated.

Do I repeat myself? Very well, then. I'm OK now, always have been. You can be or not; it's not entirely up to you or me because “we are lived,” as Charles Fort remarked. Actually, to go a bit further, we live each other. And what I'm saying here is part of anyone's life who contacts me, or this.

Be that as it may, and it will, believe I dust my broom (thanks to Taj Mahal). Out go the buffalo corpses and the legends, living in their own minds, of our leaders and their hypnotized followers, concrete dwellers, all the caged people preaching freedom or whatever they preach that just might as well be locking up everyone who doesn't fit in their cage, there's lots of money to be earned keeping people imprisoned, docile, working their machines, hoes, whatever until the Singularity when Social Security collapses and the bankers foreclose on everything to pay for a better space ship. Money isn't everything, it's a social construct. You know?

This is crazy, right?

Yeah. Take my word for it.