(Editor's Note: We've had only intermittant contact with Dee Louis as he has progressed further into the dredges of the southernmost places of the earth. As he teeters on the edge, we provide this dispatch, looking more like a cry for help than informed literature. The title is quoted from a particularly sauce-drenched conversation with Ms. Shady, his muse)
A long time ago, I visited the state of my birth, Arkansas. A hot, dusty place inhabited by hair and empty wallets, universities and hippie communes, somehow both lost AND forgotten. I thought of the sun-parched earth "How could any roots take hold here?" Folks drift through towns like Eureka Springs and Ballmer like ditchweeds. The past seemingly unable to get a grip, stories and generations flying away in the singing sand. I do specifically remember ordering a footlong and seeing the confusing sign reading "Absolutely NO SHARING!", so it wasn't all bad I guess.
I suppose that lack of permanence, that shifting sands and winds feel, it concentrates strongly in a place like this. We're operating without a chute now, totally floating from place to place and slowly are losing our sense of home. That word never lends itself to any positive thought. Home is too entrenched, too constricting. I'd much prefer "Sleep Hole". Nah, but without that pull, without much to bother and complain about, life becomes something of an oddity. Honestly, how can you get down about anything in a situation like this? The only thing that is amplified to an extreme negative is the lazy behavior, but that's just because there's nothing else to focus on. It's easy to sit and talk about shit you ain't gonna do when rent's coming up and your car's in the shit house.
Another thing you must understand is that - like the pull of the tide - this place turns my writing to a convoluted fucking mess. So bear with me.
They tumble through this place and others, worshipping at the feet of this particular buddha, holding out for that dying candle, that flicker of permanence, letting it slip away and facing themselves in the reflection. Cut loose with 25,000 frequent flyer miles, lives wedged into people-sized luggage, eyes ever wide and sponge-like. True warriors, I suppose. Fighting against ideals that in the place where I now call home - The Great White - are suffocating and all-encompassing. To witness a backpacker in Minny is like meeting a Turkish German. Once in a lifetime if you're lucky, and thanks to christ, not once more.
This wave of temporary people, they crash through and recede and another arrives with stunning regularity and sameness, but the personalities behind the numbers are insanely different. The stories are filling up like a hard drive, and we're going to have to begin dumping. The situations, the backgrounds, never in my life have I come across this hodge-podge of humanity, and that includes 8 trips to Vegas. Hell, there, you're just looking at 3 million different versions of the same sad story. Here, you're tasting the corners, licking the salt as it were.
There's something burning in them, something like a booster always giving them movement, if not always direction. As the sign says, "The best plan is no plan". This coming from the mouth of a German who parked a mile away from a vineyard to hear Eric Clapton make it talk. It's just natural, a way of life to them. Just as you would parrot back a list of your values and hopes, they would rifle off Capitals, Culture, and Time Spent. It really makes for good talk, all of this stimuli like nothing you've ever heard, sentences presented in semi-english that you wouldn't even understand if the Queen herself spoke them. The home fires burn out, but the soul is wealthy in fuel.
I figure that wealth must be something unmeasurable, something that not many from back in The White have a sense of, something not to be revered but bottled up and mocked. I figure, also, that I would've been one to do that as well, so it stands to reason that I should be here, now looking through the mirror, forced into a change brought on by 19 hours of travel. Payment for my past transgressions - pennance for my former prejudices. The only ignorance I have ever so knowingly nurtured, so expressly embraced, is one of Isolation. That's the big bear in the room, the swinging left turn that lives hinge on. You can't go back from either direction... once you're here, you have no steps to retrace. Thinking about it only deepens the resolve, only further smashes your previous actions, only swims you out, beyond the chop.
And, like I said, once you take off, sever those roots, start treading on hollowed ground, well that's when it starts to make more sense. I guess it's not knowledge per se - something parallel to that, something words only dramatize.
You could call it soul, and you wouldn't get much argument.
The past lingers in memories stored in caverns of The Grey, and likely will never relenquish its grip on unconscious thought. Burn the home down, but it just keeps right on blazing in your mind. Fight like hell to get out of it, and like me, you'll end up making the memory stronger, feeling your roots like appendages, unable to shake what feels unnecessary. The only solution is to force it. The only way you cut the ties is with a violent jerk, something so strong mere electrical brain power can't keep up. A flight lasting almost an entire day to a place where shadow is in sunlight, and you meet a guy on a beach with two dogs that are part dingo. This is how it happens, how you change.
This is how you start to understand these travellers. How friendship and Good Contact takes the place of ignorance and apathy.
You look through the one way mirror, and it only strengthens your sight, only sharpens your rods and cones.
Then you can recognize yourself when it turns around.
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