Monday, February 20, 2006

Dreams of the End

So, there has been a temporary hiatus in one of my favorite activities. And in the one day, the dreams instantly returned. Last night:

One or two aloof tourists even took pictures as it descended. The backdrop pearlescent blue, the object huge and strange. It was made to fly, whatever it was, its swooping wings flattening out a terminal trajectory. Its shaped defined by a mass of functional equipment, huge tubes and casings and turbines; and yet it left behind no contrail. It was noon when I sat in the café, in hushed wonder like everyone else, and realized it was going to crash.
We couldn’t tell how far away it was, and a different crowd may have placed bets. It was either the size of a small plane and very close or enormous and quite far away; an indeterminable amount of haze between It and us observers suggested the latter.
I finished my coffee and headed back to the hotel room, the complex being one of these long, thin hotels with uneconomical frontage, permissible only in the middle of nowhere. We were surrounded by farmer’s fields, most now wild in obsolescence. From the bed of my room I could look out at the object as it got closer and closer to the earth, It was cutting a diagonal line from my right to left and I anticipated the crash with some anxiety. Was it a bomb, foreign and ugly? Would it destroy us all instantly upon contact?
I had to stand in the doorway to watch it crash. There was no explosion; it seemed to simply enter the earth a few miles away followed by a modest flash. Some people from the hotel packed their kids into the car and headed toward the crash site. I had no such inclination; rather I began to pack up my belongings. Something was sure to happen soon.
I saw the structure as I was putting things into the car, but I hadn’t seen it construct itself and was bewildered as I looked up. Over the crash site a huge skeletal construction had been erected and in an instant it was burning. It looked like the flaming remnants of a towering skyscraper. Before my eyes another one materialized directly adjacent. Hulking black with thick crossmembers. “Impassable” I said aloud, referring to the fact that it would be impossible to go thru the structure, not on foot and certainly not in a vehicle. A small crowd of people, now screaming and terrified, stood out in the parking lot and pointed out behind the hotel. Identical structures had grown there as well. Three now four, the original site was now five abreast. They were appearing in the haze faster and faster.
I didn’t check out. I may have even left toiletries on the bathroom counter. I got in the car and drove, on pure instincts, parallel to the alien boundary rising around us. Within an hour, on both sides, it stretched to the horizon.
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Saturday, February 11, 2006

J Dilla died yesterday . As it turns out, a couple years ago he suffered from kidney failure primarily as a result of malnutrition. He so obsessively worked at his craft that he often went without food.

There's something big about to happen, and now's a throat-clearing before a war cry. The mitten is in crisis right now, and consider lucky those who swing out windows as the roof collapses. We're shedding the very same jobs that made this place prosperous, we're ignoring the potential vitality of our flagship city, the corporations that propped us up are incompetent and spineless. Michigan has something significant to say about the state of the US, it is here that we can watch a preview of how Rome slides into obsolescence. We'd be luckier if it burned to the ground, but instead malnutrition insures that it will weeze and gasp until the final moment.

I wanted to see this demise, viewing myself as something of a journalist of the human condition. I wanted to embrace the unmentionables that society so often ignores. I wanted to witness the consequences of my actions and nestle into the rarer condition in the freedom/security equation. And I have.

I'll save all cliches about embracing change, after all its not often that things go better than planned.
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