pith…

(A MISPLACED FLASHBACK FROM WINTRY UGLINESS IN MILWAUKEE)

“I am guilty, Lord, but I am also a lover - and I am one of your best people, as you know; and yea tho I have walked in many strange shadows and acted crazy from time to time and even drooled on many High Priests, I have not been an embarrassment to you…So leave me alone, goddamnit, and send Mr. Screwjack back to me; and if the others have any questions or snide comments about it, tell them to eat shit and die.” - R.D.

Friends, you know this is the truth, just like Raoul Duke and his blood-lusting tomcat, an imagined beastly desire hides somewhere deep within all of us. Not that there is anything natural, at all, about sodomizing an innocent animal, no matter if it has razor-sharp claws and a vice of bone-crushing teeth, but eventually one must get repulsed enough by wallowing with the human race to fantasize, on drugs or not, about the true possibilities of all life. To straighten things out, this is not a decree of bestiality, the pitiful people who fuck with animals should be castrated and stoned by an angry mob right on Main St. of whatever town they live in. The point here, which may or may not apparently lie within this obscure metaphor, is that the limit of sedentary, mundane living infects the human soul and psyche like the plague, and for me personally begs to be shattered like a brand new plate glass window.

As I lube the gears of my mind with slimy fistfuls of crude realism, and pump wild and impure imagination through the thin red walls of my beaten heart faster than raw sewage overflows into Lake Michigan, I grapple with the cold realization of inner plight. Pushing the limit of twenty-three years in this city, long gone past stir crazy, my flight is overdue so now I’m bracing myself and finally ready to get the hell out of Dodge. Naturally, West is the only direction to head, face the wind and burn out across state-long cornfields until the land starts to roll and the trail of rock jutting upward grows into the Rockies. The thin air will do my mind and lungs some much needed good, the snow will thicken my skin and fuel pointed screeds like spitting kerosene on an altar of flickering Virgin candles.

I will be reborn on a moonlit mountaintop in a blizzard dancing naked, except for a grizzly bear tooth necklace hanging around my neck, with a megaphone in one hand and a bottle of bourbon splashing from the other. A two-hundred pound Husky, more wolf than dog with eyes that change color with the seasons will be my only companion, howling strange duets with me into the basting handheld speaker and lapping from the bottle. A catharsis of pure madness will echo over peaks and down canyons into sleepy ski villages where tourists will be ripped from a fat cat dreamland by the unGodly song of beast and man. Livestock will turn wild-eyed and tear through barbwire fences, storming the farmhouses and trampling their owners tucked away in warm beds. The deranged swan song will ring out to resound in deaf ears and make the increasingly illiterate youth peel themselves from television screens and pick up books with yellowed pages that leave paper cuts on their frail little hands. With any luck at all, my words will become shards of broken beer bottles on the painful path to the enlightenment of this darkening Reality.

John Dick
December 2007