Words

Here is a group of words, for people who read words.

The Storm rolls in.

The clouds an awning for the trees to gather under, 

Whispering about neighbors and traffic.

The Storm turns the forest into a sea squall.

Unspoken tides of wind rushing through leaves,

unable to defend.

The Rain falls,

the Light fades,

the Landscapes, 

shift to Dreamscapes.

Shadows melt and form,

Jumping near the corners of my eyes.

Details are washed away

by a million droplets,

all finding a different path

to hit bottom. 

The Truth is Out There?

The Truth is Out There?

So here I sit, on my couch, laptop and TV going, living via the screen. I've just finished a particularly famous Episode of The X-Files which brings it's dense mythology to a tidy explanation of the Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr assassinations, and this week's Mythbusters is beginning to play from the DVR. The episode is dedicated to proving that the moon landing did in fact happen. According to the first five minutes, twenty percent of Americans still believe the landing was faked.

What is our fascination with the idea of government coverups, of men in dark suits riding in black helicopters, playing doctor for cattle in the middle of Bumble-Fuck Iowa? Why do some accept that our government would have the audacity or the wits to bring down the Twin Towers? How does one man convince millions that shape-shifting Reptoids have taken hold of our governments in the form of Bush, Gore, Queen Elizabeth (believable) and Bill Clinton?

The list of conspiracies is endless. I could go at length about any of them, from how water fluoridation is really a secret form of mind control meant to dumb down the American populace, or how the Navy actually harnessed Einstein's proposed "Unified Field Theory", and used it to to warp a navy destroyer from Philadelphia to Norfolk Virginia and back again, but I have my favorites. One is Project MKULTRA. It was a covert operation by the CIA to research mind control using psychotropic chemicals like LSD and mescaline sometimes combined with hypnosis for research in altering brain function and state of mind.

The project entailed giving drugs to unwitting civilians from all walks of life, and administering hypnosis to other test subjects. The tests in fact were relatively unscientific, as the "researchers" were CIA agents babysitting those experiencing the drugs. The main goal of the project is thought to have to have been to create a "Manchurian Candidate", though no evidence of their success has been discovered. (As a side note, it should be noted that many of the MKULTRA documents were destroyed following orders from Richard Helms.) This conspiracy, however unsettling it may be, was in fact broken wide open, despite attempts to destroy the documents involved. My point with this case is that even deep reaching conspiracies can be and are broken open.  When looking seriously at many of these cover ups one notices that the are never very complicated. MKULTRA was literally field operatives slipping unsuspecting civilians LSD, with little to no scientific data recorded or recovered. Statements made indicated that no properly and scientifically trained were involved in the project. The Watergate thefts were essentially cat burglaries, and while they led to more crimes in higher levels of government, there were no complex and advanced schemes to enslave the nation.

I am torn between passing off any suspicion of conspiracy as delusions and paranoia, and that nagging "what if". What if cocaine found its way into money and development deprived ghettos in the seventies through some hand other than black market supply and demand? What if the Twin Towers fell not only through our own government's ignorance and failure to act on multiple signs of impending violence on America, but by the hand of dark forces working within the framework of our government control structures? What if the slow Katrina response, the failed war in Iraq, and every perceived failure of our government are really just part of an enormous, earth spanning conspiracy for control of the way we live? I had an interesting thought when looking through these lists of conspiracies that have been cracked and proven, which was that the men who have been brought to to justice, who have had their duplicity shown, are usually publicly known and elected, high ranking officials. Nixon for example, was elected by this country, yet we see that so many crimes traces back to his ever tape-recorded office. What if these publicly elected men, men we supposedly trusted enough to run our lives, are just the tip of the iceberg? What if in back rooms of the pentagon, where the lights are dim and the white washed walls have no markings, there are cigarette smoking men, planning and scheming to run the world's affairs? 

I think that's the draw of the X-Files, of UFO conventions, of the mysterious "Men In Black", of cattle mutilations, the JFK assassinations, and Area 51. It's the idea that we may be powerless, that our actions and daily failures and problems amount to nothing in the face of the insurmountable power of the government's deception and lies. The idea that we are all victims, to mysterious and unnamed men, working in the shadows, the secret heart and cause of our problems and tragedies.

I think that yes, there have been, and always will be corrupt members of government, willing and able to bend and break rules for whatever gains, but that they too, are human. All human endeavors, whether putting a man on the moon, writing a constitution, stealing files from a hotel, or simply recording a new album, will always have snags. This combined with the fact that there will always be those who suspect and fear those who are in power, will usually make it impossible to keep even a simple operation under wraps.

With JFK, and only JFK, I almost believe there may have been some kind of plot. Extracting one man from such a chaotic scene may have been possible with one extremely trained soldier, but this belief is a frightening slope. If there was someone else, who? And who hired them? If it was some dark government sect, does that organization still exist? 

To be honest, when it comes to these schemes of grandeur and violence, I don't want to believe. No matter how powerful our president may be, or any other person in our government is, they are all still human. They need worry about their mortgages, about their chidren's braces, about the fact that the bathroom tiles are far too cold in the morning. They're people too, and in a nation that loves to suspect them, thrives on demonizing their secrecy, mistakes will be caught. 

For your viewing pleasure, I present to you the most detailed maps of Area 51 available to the public, and some links to fun conspiracy theories:

http://fas.org/irp/overhead/groom.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFK_assassination

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mkultra

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Experiment

Three Cheers To the Unknown

Intro

Brody Maires rolled over in his bed and woke up 3 seconds before the alarm clock went off as it always did, screaming through the empty dark quiet in his bedroom. The sound was unfair and insulting. He had after all woken up on time but the siren wailed on, a punch in the face. Scrambling across the floor, nearly tripping on the shirts, magazines, trash, and pens that covered the floor Brody finally reached the clock and fumbled with it before it shut off. The silence that followed was heavy. With a sigh he left his room to get ready.

A mile away, Max Engels stretched lazily on the roof of his shack, situated at the bottom of the hilly property that his parent’s house was perched on. The hot June weather had given him the perfect opportunity to sleep up on the roof of the shack that the band had converted from his bedroom to a practice space/dump/rumpus room. He smiled happily as he rose and shuffled through the mess of sheet music, blankets, guitars and rolling papers that were scattered across the roof. He grabbed one of the few shirts that wasn’t dirty and threw it on. The smoke from the fires that were burning a few miles south had gotten closer overnight, a looming tidal wave of ruddy brown creeping over the hills towards town, from three sides. Trudging up the hill past the main house where his father and sister lived, Max became quickly aware of just how close the smoke was; a vast vaguely orange blight on the horizon. His father was out on the front lawn, making a half-hearted attempt to practice Tai Chi, an activity he had taken up shortly after the divorce. Max was glad to see him out of the house, but Ben looked plainly ridiculous. He had a wiry, unsophisticated frame, and wearing his bathrobe, his unconfident movements took on a cartoonish stutter that brought a smile to Max’s face as he brought his bike from the garage. He swung his leg over the bike and let gravity take control, accelerating smoothly through the bend in the driveway and down the road. He realized he had forgotten his books, but kept rolling. The smoke was getting too close to learn anything today.

Down the hill, Brody shuffled into his car, preoccupied by the amounts of ash that had built up on the car. The night before, he had noticed it falling, almost like snow, but now it powdered the car, and sucked the hues and warmth from everything it landed on.
The hilly back road he took to school was nearly devoid of traffic and as he remembered the last accident he was in, the one that totaled his car and ripped through the back end of a large pick up truck, Brody saw Max swing down into the road in front of him, coasting in the morning sun. He and Max had been friends for years, long before they started the band. Just then a large white SUV swerved in front of him, having launched top speed backwards out of a drive way. The truck stopped to shift into drive, sliding backwards to a halt, and Max nearly fell off the bike in his efforts to avoid collision. Startled, Brody rolled towards the scene slowly. A mother wearing what looked like clothes found in stores for preteen girls was screaming through her enormous sunglasses, leaning though the space that her tinted window had been moments earlier. Max stood slack shouldered looking scared and confused. The children who were being driven to school finally realized something was happening outside their Gameboys and rolled down the back windows to stare. Brody honked his horn and Max turned around. With a relieved look on his face, he dragged his bike towards the car, with the mother still screaming and giving him the finger from the SUV behind him.

After he loaded the bike in the back of the station wagon and buckled in, Max sighed, tilted his head back, rubbing his eyes.

“Why doesn’t anyone take responsibility?” he groaned. “ She doesn’t even dress responsibly.”

Sometimes Max said ridiculous things, pseudo-philosophical rants about what he thought western society was doing to the world, what capitalism was doing to our hearts. It was a habit imbued in him by the pot he smoked and the short segments of books he would pick up, all mangled into strings of incoherent soliloquies. Rarely he made a statement that made any sense. Brody couldn’t decide whether Max had a real point, or if he was listening to the sound of his own voice. Getting closer to the school, they passed the various underpasses, bushes, nooks and crannies deemed good enough to hide the elicit activities needed by some students to get through the rest of the day. Brody knew from the smell that had wafted in as Max had gotten into the car that he had already smoked at home, to better enjoy his coaster ride to school, and so he didn’t bother to ask if Max wanted to be dropped off with any of the pushers. They rode the rest of the way to school in silence.

They both shared their first class, a chemistry course that they were taking a second time. The remedial course was a direct cross-section of the underachievers that went to the school. To Brody’s left, a girl whose cell phone was apparently her life partner. Two tables away, two stoners who seemed only able to talk about trucks and dirt bikes. Max sat across the classroom already deeply involved with his book, yet another fantasy paperback. Brody smiled. Max tore through those books.

It was about midway through class when it happened. At the table in front of him, a short trucker hat wearing asshole whose name Brody did not know was playing with a lighter. Brody knew instinctually something bad was about to happen, and got up to ask to go to the bathroom. As he approached the front desk, he saw Mrs. Giest stuff a small flask under the table. She was a skinny, wild eyed, unusually passive woman. Her voice often cracked, and sounded as though she was going to cry.

“I’m going to the bathroom.”

“Er, well, you, allright.”

She turned and bent down, sitting at her chair, and picked at the spine of one of the loaner textbooks, humming to herself.

As he walked to the door, he heard someone recounting yet another story about the loudest diesel motor ever, and noticed that the trucker hat kid was playing with the gas main at his table. Each table was equipped with Bunsen burner gas mains, but normally they were turned off.

He passed the Change for Darfur soda bottle that had been plastered with drawings of the the world burning in lowrider flames and a child’s face crying for food. The bottle was empty.

A loud whooshing noise and a sudden burst of heat and light flared through the classroom. Brody flinched instinctively and glanced backwards to see the kid in the trucker hat reeling backwards screaming, looking as shocked as he was singed, clutching his lighter as he fell to the floor. The ball of fire that reached the ceiling, whirling in the air told Brody that the idiot kid had lit the main. The girls in the classroom screamed, some used their phones to take videos, others took cover. Most of the guys in the class room were laughing, their shocked faces travelling from the teacher, to the now disappearing fireball, to Kyle, and back. Finally Max was drawn away from his book, as a student tripped running for a fire extinguisher and knocked into him. He looked up, surveying the classroom with a solemn unreadable expression, put his feet up on the table and continued reading. Ms. Geist stood in the same place she had been writing on the board. Feet together, shoulders slack, she sighed, looking at her hands and left the classroom through the back door, into the chemistry supply room.

The classroom stood for an awkward minute in stunned silence. The sprinklers and fire alarms had failed to go off. The odd silence was broken only when trucker hat’s friend began to laugh and congratulate him on the fireworks. The students looked around, unsure of what to do. As the classroom chatter began to pick up, and and the students reached for their cell-phones to tell everyone what had happened, Brody walked quickly and tapped Max, and without a glance to each other they left the classroom.
The rest of the day Brody’s stomach was in knots. The mountain line had become obscured in the smoke, which seemed to steadily creep over the hills and towards the school.

Woah Woah Woah

It is now 4:55 am. I have created a blog . 

I seem to be procrastinating sleeping. 

Hopefully this section of internet real estate will not go unused and neglected.

The next post will be the rough intro to a story I have been thinking of someday writing in full.

I hope that if someone reads this intro, they will tell me exactly what they think, so that i can scrap it, or change it, or add a giant man eating snake from our long begotten space-going friend Pluto. 

So if you really have to procrastinate doing something stupid, like sleeping, or if you have nothing to do, ever, then read this, and tell me what you think.