A Dang Shame

Sure liked The Dukes of Hazzard when I was a wee child.  Beautiful man voice theme song, talkin about those beautiful boys that never meant no harm.  They just wanna fly their pretty orange car over random rivers, pursued by unscary little comic relief policemans.  One of them had a floppy-eared dog.  Sometimes there was a pretty lady there.  When stuff got too wild, beardy uncle would settle it down.  If I remember all that right.

I loved the shape of a muscle car, the perfect combination of boxy and curvy, the dark grill reminiscent of the intakes on jet engines, the feeling of power and possibility.  They stopped making cars shaped like that and I always wished they’d bring them back.

Well, around pandemic time, they actually did.  Muscle cars exist again, happy day!  But I’m not four years old anymore, don’t live in a world where fast driving never kills or disfigures people, don’t live in a world where gratuitous fossil fuel use is a harmless lark.

And just everything about that piece of shit tv show has aged equally well.  It put a shiny sexy funtimes gloss on the worst shit imaginable, just the worst crimes in human history.  Hundreds of years of monstrous evil defended to the dying breath under that fucking orange flag.  The way the flag’s renewed popularity in the 20th century had always been a banner for the proud perpetuation of dehumanization and oppression, of lionizing the villains of history that Hitler himself was inspired by.

General Lee, fuck your memory and fuck the people who tried to sing it sweetly to tiny children.  Fuck whatever ancestors of mine that put our surname on generations of their rape victims, their human “property.”  Fuck ameriKKKa for clinging to the idea of our virtue on the blood-drenched soil of this land, echoes of absolute horror in every ruined plot and parking lot from sea to polluted sea.

Unrelated, fuck street racers, who care so little about the lives of others they endanger them every day for cheap thrills.  Rest in pieces you criminal fuckers.  May all your buddies mangle only their own flesh, may they fly past the innocent and burst into flames alone.

Shame shame shame, a little song of shame.  Then I return to idle fancies and daydreams in my usual way.  A floppy-eared dog hanging his head out an unproblematic car, flying merrily through a consequence-free world.

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had a dream the other night i was some gal’s gay best friend, so i had an excuse for not knowing how to drive, hey, same excuse i have irl, except i have no hetero bff here.

anyway, we went to a little movie theater where you reserved your seat by taking a slice of cake, the colors of which corresponded to the movie you wanted to see.  but the only slices remaining were the white ones with rainbow splotches, corresponding to the cg smurf threequel, so we took no cake and watched nothing.

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Waiting in the Car Again

I have the degenerative disc disease.  Not crippling most of the time, so far, but the first of those three Ds promises that by the time I’m able to retire, I won’t have the spine to enjoy it much.  Meanwhile, I avoid catastrophically throwing out my back (again) by strategically deploying my spine points.  Kinda like spoons, but specific to spines.  I can feel out when my fortitude is getting iffy and stop doing things.

So we’re out at garage sales and thrift stores and garden centers for a day, and walking slowly is worse for my back than walking quickly, so keeping my lovin’ man company as he shops drains the spinals.  At the last stop I decided to stay in the car.  Two of four windows were cracked and I put up the foldy silver dealy to reduce heat coming through the windshield, I put a hoodie on the lil hook thing over the back seat window on the sun side to also block some.  But the sun burned off what was left of the overcast morning and the air began to boil.

I finished slowly nursing a cold drink.  I almost fell asleep and woke up again.  I wanted to be able to rest my eyes so I put on Radiohead’s Amnesiac and stopped looking at my phone.  Jumped in the river, what did I see?  Black-eyed angels swam with me.  I ran out of drink and started melting the ice cubes in the cup over my head and arms.  This just felt like spinning plates.  I ran out of ice cubes about the time I ran out of Radiohead.

I locked the doors, got out, and lo, there was a dumpster near, for the empty cup.  When I tossed the cup, I found myself able to see around a wall and lo, there was a port-a-potty.  I had to drain the lizard, so I stepped inside.  Warm, but not as warm as the car, and far from the nastiest port-a-potty I’d used.

As I started to go, I saw inside the urinal a little organic bit of matter lurking, pale brown like a bramble under summer sun.  But no, I had a good idea that this was a spider, and it quickly emerged to confirm the theory.  My vision is deteriorating, so too close and too far I can’t see well, but this guy was in the sweet spot where I might have been able to count the eyeballs.  Not the biggest spider but far from the tiniest, adroitly trooping as it circumnavigated the pissing zone.  Would it jump on my junk?  Would the story get worse?

No.  I left in peace.  There was a low-key moment of stress when I noticed the door’s plastic inside latch was half torn away.  Somebody else’s problem.

After all that, I rolled around the corner to see my man coming out of the place with a cart full of plant life.  Good timing all around.

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