heres an excerpt from my magnum opus. its for all of you. its supposed to be entertaining as well as my own personal catharsis. if theres any bullshit in there let me know and ill go back to the drawing board. the entire work, of which this is a tiny piece, is hundreds of pages. i want a publisher to spread the word. the word being: ....
they rode thru a bunch of cities, disseminated themselves and their hot air among the populace and the contours of the earth beneath that populaces pavements and buildings. they sank a footer into every place they stopped for water and food and left in the same desultory mess of incompletion as they had arrived in. they called the new one hernan, pronounced anglican, because that was markered on his water bottle, which one random nite just disappeared from the train, probably kicked across the floor by an uneasy dreamer and booted right out of the gap in the door. they rode north out of a congestion of traffic and backsides of buildings and eyeless factories, great tottering husks now of exposed beams and falling block walls, cross sections of their anatomies visible in the snapshot of their ruin, caught as the train rolled by and into some other peoples leftovers, dead businesses now bearing in high perched tags the tell tale signs of habitation, roosts for those unseen bodies that even now were making a home in the fallen spaces on either side of defunct spur tracks where once hoppers sat waiting to be loaded then tugged away by electric yard dogs but now were overgrown with grasses and hogweed. rode out of long corridors where the tracks were sunk beneath street level and lined with retaining walls ornamented in miles long convolutions of apocalyptic and surreptitious rococos of graffiti and topped with enormous sloppy brakes of razorwire. the weight and speed and language of it all, the top halves of billboards and the messages in the spray paint and the scalloped manner in which the people out there in their world inundated themselves and lived and shit and ate over and under each other, it was a restaurant where peanuts are cracked around the table and you drop the shells on the floor.
then one night the air turned hot, you could feel the change even in the fast draft in the night, and when the train stopped and the air was calm, he knew generally where along the route they were now. the sun came up and the world was bleached and yellowed and there were no more buildings or even roads, just, on poking his head out of the door, the body of the train ahead and behind, swaying and squealing on the tracks, heaving like a lung, and out there were unreal white dunes of sand, their tapered tops, whipped into cowlicks and locks, disintegrating into the wind. you could see the wind, given form by unfurling bolts of sand in the air and momentary sidewinders up and down the fine dunes. the primary blue of the sky was so vivid and glowing along the borders where to his eye it seemed to meet the outline of the dunes, that it appeared as if it, the sky itself, had been poorly greenscreened into the background.
he reposed in a corner, his back in the angle and his legs stretched out on the steel boards, rattling along with the train and wonderfully unable to think within its uproar, falling into and out of a half sleep, and watching, in a dire sort of peace, the one who called herself oneida as she lay on her belly, uncased from the rest of the shadowy and greased interior by a slab of sun that fell thru the door, and peered out into the technicolor world. the train slowed and labored up a long low grade. the walls were hot. the train slowed again, abruptly, and the slack drawn out along its length kicked the car. grassy foothills rose out of the sand and the train moved very slowly and steadily. a road appeared in the distance. there was heavy traffic on it speeding by in the direction of the trains travel. a craggy sided mountain, leaning beyond the smooth hills, jutted into the blue sky, out of view. oneida leaned out of the door and looked up at it. its open granite face, the creeping pine that grew sideways from cracks in the huge boards of stone that stood on end along rivulets down which cascaded thin weightless brooks, stood within the frame of the door in high resolution. the pure snow at the peak glowed and was featureless, a hole cut in the sky revealing itself as a layer underneath, a starched undershirt. sage scrub over an alluvial fan swept out from a knuckle in the mountain and the road in the distance curved rapidly toward the train to avoid the incline and keep on the plain of the desert. everyone inside scooted away from the door to avoid the eyes of the people in their vehicles. the land levelled off and the train picked up speed, put the mountains behind them.
they saw groves of orange trees and groves of lemon trees. their leaves were deep green and waxy looking, and they saw amid a reach of sand a grove of lemon trees with the tops mowed flat by a tractor that was moving down the aisles. they saw down long green rows pointing away from the road beside the tracks, with cars parked on the shoulder of the road and in the dirt of the fields beside the road, with men and women covered along their arms and legs to the wrists and ankles, in gloves and hair nets and white aprons and sneakers and cowboy boots, stooped in the fields, their hands in the leaves. they saw the barkless palo verde along the road and in vacant sandblown lots, repositories of dumpsters and litter and construction equipment, between storefronts and empty houses, and growing among some gnarled hillocks of sand and rock in which people in dune buggies and on four wheelers were careening and jumping, a woman in a bikini and helmet with a mirrored visor waving to them. in the background were rows of bales of cotton the size of garbage trucks and wrapped tight in plastic, being pulled by machines onto the covered beds of special straight trucks. towns crept up from the sand in exhibitions of asphalt and traffic and gas stations and the flashing railroad crossings they blew thru, that at nite briefly filled the car with red light and the lonesome loping clangor of the bell as they crossed the paths of waiting traffic whose headlights pointed briefly into the car, sticking shadows of telephone poles and road signs across the floor that jack knifed up the wall, stretched slow then fast, before all blinked into darkness again. the towns came and went.
they rode thru a bunch of cities, disseminated themselves and their hot air among the populace and the contours of the earth beneath that populaces pavements and buildings. they sank a footer into every place they stopped for water and food and left in the same desultory mess of incompletion as they had arrived in. they called the new one hernan, pronounced anglican, because that was markered on his water bottle, which one random nite just disappeared from the train, probably kicked across the floor by an uneasy dreamer and booted right out of the gap in the door. they rode north out of a congestion of traffic and backsides of buildings and eyeless factories, great tottering husks now of exposed beams and falling block walls, cross sections of their anatomies visible in the snapshot of their ruin, caught as the train rolled by and into some other peoples leftovers, dead businesses now bearing in high perched tags the tell tale signs of habitation, roosts for those unseen bodies that even now were making a home in the fallen spaces on either side of defunct spur tracks where once hoppers sat waiting to be loaded then tugged away by electric yard dogs but now were overgrown with grasses and hogweed. rode out of long corridors where the tracks were sunk beneath street level and lined with retaining walls ornamented in miles long convolutions of apocalyptic and surreptitious rococos of graffiti and topped with enormous sloppy brakes of razorwire. the weight and speed and language of it all, the top halves of billboards and the messages in the spray paint and the scalloped manner in which the people out there in their world inundated themselves and lived and shit and ate over and under each other, it was a restaurant where peanuts are cracked around the table and you drop the shells on the floor.
then one night the air turned hot, you could feel the change even in the fast draft in the night, and when the train stopped and the air was calm, he knew generally where along the route they were now. the sun came up and the world was bleached and yellowed and there were no more buildings or even roads, just, on poking his head out of the door, the body of the train ahead and behind, swaying and squealing on the tracks, heaving like a lung, and out there were unreal white dunes of sand, their tapered tops, whipped into cowlicks and locks, disintegrating into the wind. you could see the wind, given form by unfurling bolts of sand in the air and momentary sidewinders up and down the fine dunes. the primary blue of the sky was so vivid and glowing along the borders where to his eye it seemed to meet the outline of the dunes, that it appeared as if it, the sky itself, had been poorly greenscreened into the background.
he reposed in a corner, his back in the angle and his legs stretched out on the steel boards, rattling along with the train and wonderfully unable to think within its uproar, falling into and out of a half sleep, and watching, in a dire sort of peace, the one who called herself oneida as she lay on her belly, uncased from the rest of the shadowy and greased interior by a slab of sun that fell thru the door, and peered out into the technicolor world. the train slowed and labored up a long low grade. the walls were hot. the train slowed again, abruptly, and the slack drawn out along its length kicked the car. grassy foothills rose out of the sand and the train moved very slowly and steadily. a road appeared in the distance. there was heavy traffic on it speeding by in the direction of the trains travel. a craggy sided mountain, leaning beyond the smooth hills, jutted into the blue sky, out of view. oneida leaned out of the door and looked up at it. its open granite face, the creeping pine that grew sideways from cracks in the huge boards of stone that stood on end along rivulets down which cascaded thin weightless brooks, stood within the frame of the door in high resolution. the pure snow at the peak glowed and was featureless, a hole cut in the sky revealing itself as a layer underneath, a starched undershirt. sage scrub over an alluvial fan swept out from a knuckle in the mountain and the road in the distance curved rapidly toward the train to avoid the incline and keep on the plain of the desert. everyone inside scooted away from the door to avoid the eyes of the people in their vehicles. the land levelled off and the train picked up speed, put the mountains behind them.
they saw groves of orange trees and groves of lemon trees. their leaves were deep green and waxy looking, and they saw amid a reach of sand a grove of lemon trees with the tops mowed flat by a tractor that was moving down the aisles. they saw down long green rows pointing away from the road beside the tracks, with cars parked on the shoulder of the road and in the dirt of the fields beside the road, with men and women covered along their arms and legs to the wrists and ankles, in gloves and hair nets and white aprons and sneakers and cowboy boots, stooped in the fields, their hands in the leaves. they saw the barkless palo verde along the road and in vacant sandblown lots, repositories of dumpsters and litter and construction equipment, between storefronts and empty houses, and growing among some gnarled hillocks of sand and rock in which people in dune buggies and on four wheelers were careening and jumping, a woman in a bikini and helmet with a mirrored visor waving to them. in the background were rows of bales of cotton the size of garbage trucks and wrapped tight in plastic, being pulled by machines onto the covered beds of special straight trucks. towns crept up from the sand in exhibitions of asphalt and traffic and gas stations and the flashing railroad crossings they blew thru, that at nite briefly filled the car with red light and the lonesome loping clangor of the bell as they crossed the paths of waiting traffic whose headlights pointed briefly into the car, sticking shadows of telephone poles and road signs across the floor that jack knifed up the wall, stretched slow then fast, before all blinked into darkness again. the towns came and went.
