Brock LayFayette: the poor-man's Wheeler Jones

There is a "law" that can be found referenced in certain esoteric texts, sometimes directly, sometimes not; it's there though.
It's called "The Law of Infinite Regress".
Mull that a bit.

The subject of this blog references a previous blog entry I made a long time ago, after trying to connect with people beyond pissing contests, and fights over who can use "internet research" to vindicate their point.

It was a joke, and the gist was: no one understands me and I just want to go home and pet my kittens.

I received OVERWHELMING sincere response to that entry, much to my astonishment.

What did I learn from that lesson? Two things:

1- it confirmed to me that humanity, at its root, is ONLY equal in misery. We can be human with each other in the storm. We bond on real equality of circumstance, not notions of democracy or union of belief. We unite in the fire. I don't consider this a bad thing at all. It's proof of humanity.

2- when you create of forum for anonymous postings, you encourage what I like to think of as "regressive act-outs". What I mean by this is that people allow a true nature to guide their thoughts and fingers. The mentality of the "win" appears. Not for all. True nature can't be fooled. Good people are still good people. There is no truth serum more potent an anonymity.

When I posted my 1st blog, it did so with the notion of seeing how many #1s vs. #2s I would see.
I saw some #1s. Not many. But maybe THEY were the votes for top blog. I don't have any particular attachment to that.. I just think it's a quiet way of appreciation sometimes. Perhaps I'm naive. I don't blog often.
I saw more fighting of #2s too: people who didn't get it. Told me they DID get it but I was wrong on a, b, c... proving that they DIDN'T get it... that they were, indeed #2s.

And so the Law of Infinite Regress. Yes.
And why no one understands me.
People DO understand me, of course. Not many of them; I don't attach romantic notions to that. I've lived too long for that kind of dalliance.
But the LAW remains, operating in the spaces BETWEEN our "notions" and "ideas". The law is insurmountable but completely JUST. And when the smallness of the #2s try to bully me into their game, I only smile, and sometimes shake my head in disappointment.
It IS a law of course, and I'm just a subject to the infinite rule.

I watched a small portion of the democratic debate last night. It was too aggravating to watch much.
The low-light for me:

Obama is asked a SECOND question about someone he knew and something that person said 40 years prior, when Obama was 8 years old.

To paraphase Obama: I can answer these kinds of questions until the end of time. Making someone answer for the opinions and statements of everyone they know is insane. More importantly, these ridiculous questions that are cycled and recycled in sound bites only subvert the REAL issues that we should be talking about. We're wasting our forum and insulting the public's intelligence by focusing on this stuff.

(I suspect he read my blog as this is EXACTLY the kind of thing I posted about recently)

Hillary in response: I think we SHOULD look at these things. It's important.

*GONG*
Thanks, Hill. And the next time you start a soliloqy with "Well, I am the granddaughter of a factory worker from Scranton who went to work in the Scranton lace mills when he was 11 years old, worked his entire life there, mostly six-day weeks." ...why don't you finish the sentence with the truth: "...but as you know, I'm not in touch in the least with any of that as I made 100 million dollars last year, so I'm not sure why I keep bringing it up."

I see Obama take the high road on many of these things. I respect him for that. I'm a vindictive bastard, and I know I wouldn't be able to. I'm almost angry at him for taking the high road, but really, he's doing a good job as not reducing himself to that level. (not that he never has, of course, just generally speaking).

Obama said many times during the speech that the average American is smart enough not to get distracted by the sound-bite reality tv bamboozling that we get 24/7.
Shame on you, sir. Now YOU'RE not being honest.
If you asked Americans to describe what kind of government the country has, I DEFY you to report back that more than 1/10 DOESN'T say: "Democracy" when in fact the US is a Constitutional Republic, not a democracy.

Am I being petty? I don't think so. I'm an immigrant and I know this.
Do I expect Obama NOT to flatter the American people? I guess not. He certainly can't be a real truth-teller if he's looking to get elected. This is the subtlety and flaw of the process.

I have to get over this. I will.
I was just sickened by Obama pointing out that in order to make debate on the future of the country a meaningful exercise we cannot allow ourselves to be bamboozled... and Hillary responding: "Let's not be hasty!!!"

...but I can't really blame her, in the end, she's only the granddaughter of a factory worker from Scranton who went to work in the Scranton lace mills when he was 11 years old...

Hillary said this.
Obama said that.
McCan said this.
She's a....
He's a...

STOP drinking the koolaid.
Every time the media creates the basis of our discussion of the country's future out of sound-bites, and schoolyard taunts, rebuttals, and further taunts, and we DEVOUR it, we lose.

We eat it up, like reality tv. Guess what. It's not real. With tv, we know it. It's a guilty pleasure. It's entertainment.
Young men and women or being killed everyday though in an un-winnable war against a phantom enemy. War on terror. Terror is a TACTIC, not an enemy... and we have allowed ourselves to create the terror and the terrorists by embracing this spurious enemy and making it real.
And then, to add insult to injury, during a time where there is nothing more important than the fate of those very soldiers, and our economy, and our health, we ALLOW ourselves to treat the topic as if it WAS reality tv, mere entertainment or distraction at the end of a long day.

Do NOT miss the distinction between the two. We've allowed it. Encouraged it. Lumped it in with Rock of Love 2 and Big Brother.
Our future is not a distraction, so stop treating it like it is.
Don't allow your thoughts and discussion and opinions to be simply reactive to the sound-bites.
Above all, THINK.
The moment you reduce a person to a sound-bite, you disenfranchise yourself.
Imagine for a moment, some idiotic thing you said in your life, and having that define who you are.
Absurd, of course, but that's what we do. We've blurred the line ourselves because it's easier that way. When fiction and life have the same graphics and run-time, you abdicate your responsibility to think.
8 years of this so far while your real freedoms have eroded or been stolen.
Stop. Think.
Will your thinking be defined by this crap?
I hope not.

/RANT

As a writer, no matter how old I get, every time it happens, it's like rediscovering a new mystery.
"The Voice"
Other writers have called it different things... but to me that's what it is. The Voice.
It speaks at strange times. It tells me things. Sometimes completely. Sometimes it just hints at thing.
For me, they normally translate to short stories.
Most recently one I wrote called: "With the Dead".... which was inspired by The Voice commenting to me one morning on the drive to work that "the winter is no place for hippies".
By the end of the day the whole story wrote itself without pause.

A couple of days ago, on the drive home... (I sense a theme)... an entire story spoke itself to me in a matter of 10 minutes. This one is harder to write because I don't like what it's about. It must be written. I'm compelled to write it.
Meanwhile, another story that was just a whisper and it's up to me what it's about.

The Voice speaks only when it wants to. I've learned to be content with its silence. My own voices are loud enough in the meantime.

Below is "With the Dead". It still needs editing... I'm lazy on that.
All rights reserved. Pendulum Press 2008.

With the Dead

“The winter is no place for hippies,” he said as he threw the blanket over the top of the razor-wire fence.
This was Tucker. It was his idea. The rest of us were reluctant accomplices.
“We all get old. That’s what’s called inevitability… but hippies, shit. We don’t get old; we petrify. We’re not built for this shit. The whole lot of us should be living in Florida somewhere, eating eggs and watching the goddamn Price is Right. I’ll tell you this, man: the sun has restorative properties- all reaching ones. I read about it.
“SUE! How’s it look?”
“Fine.” She said.
“Good. Now you, my man, are gunna go over first and see what you can do.”

The three of us stood on a patch of cracked cement. Behind us was a long stretch of forest, completely barren and still. It smelled like the middle of winter even if it was only the beginning. There were drifts of snow here and there, making tiny motionless waves against the fence and they crunched under foot. It reminded me of living out west and those long stretches of flat highway with ghost-swirls of white and pitched-gray skies.
Death highways my father called them. If your truck broke down it could be hours before anyone else would pass by to help. You hoped for another trucker. They would stop. Families with bloated screaming kids and masses of pillows and snacks would never stop, especially if you were a hippie and looked like the grim reaper wearing a lumber-jacket.

“Get up over now, Ted. I ain’t gunna last in this cold.”
“Ok, Tucker.” He smiled at me and for a moment he looked dead. He was right. Winter is no place at all.
When I jumped from the top of the fence I landed hard and turned my ankle a bit. I fell poorly. Like an old man. Jesus. I was an old man.
“Christ, Teddy, you ok?”
“Yeah. I guess. What now?”
“Get around the side and look for the blue ones. They should be labeled. Its gotta be heavy. Kinda shake it if you can. Compare a few so you don’t get an empty one.”
“Ok.”

Sue stood on the other side of the fence with Tucker. “I haven’t been outta my head in a long time, Tuck.”
“I hear that.”
“I wanna get fucked up and lay down in a bed in the Radisson.”
“The old man going with you?”
“Sure. We can take a long bath and plan our next step.”
Tucker looked vaguely amused. “What step is that?”
“I gotta figure out how to market him. He can do impressions: Homer Simpson, Dr. Phil, the Family Guy. He's an artist too. He draws. He’s really talented. AND he has a 13-inch cock.”
“Sounds like he’s got a lot going for him.”
“He really does. I never told you this, Tuck, but I'm a dancer: jazz, tap, ballet, I can do it all. I was a nurse too. Then I ran a landscaping company. After that I went to the haircutting school in Middleton.”
Tucker said nothing, and she stopped as suddenly as she started. He eyes began to well up, and she turned away and wiped them with her sleeve.
“I had pot in my bag at the bus station. I did four months. School was over by then. It was too late.”
Still nothing from Tucker. Just that fucking wind.
“I’m a good person.”
Finally, from him: “I know, Sue.”
“Just wanna get out of my head and lay down on a bed in the Radisson, you know.”
“Yep.”

I found the blue cylinders and inspected the labels. NO2. Nitrous. Medical Grade.
Perfect.
I tilted one toward me, then back, then did the same with 3 others. They all felt the same. I had no idea how Tucker expected me to know if the cylinders were full.
A gust of wind whipped across the outdoor bay, stopping me suddenly. Fucking winter.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. What was I doing?

“You almost ready, Ted? My sweet-meats just crawled back up into my belly. Get movin’ back there.”

I didn’t answer. I just picked the middle cylinder randomly and began precariously rolling it, standing up, toward the fence.
You didn’t want to lay the fuckers down. Too heavy to get back up. All you did was tilt it back and kinda turn it while walking, back and forth, like a keg. I’d seen a guy in a warehouse do it once, and it looked easy. It wasn’t of course. Nothing like that ever was.

My father used to have a slingshot. He was a hippie too. We all were. The whole family. Hell, even the dog was a hippie. At least he squatted like one of us.
Dad said hippies were naturals with slingshots. The logic of this escapes me even today, but that’s what he said when he’d load a ball bearing and smash a bottle from near 50 yards. Then another. And another after that. I’d say he was a savant, but my mother AND both of my brothers could do the same.
Me? I don’t think I even scared one of those bottles. I’d try for hours, never with success, and end up shooting ball bearings at the sun instead, making brief eclipses just for me, and wondering if we were going to move again. That’s what we did. We moved. Every couple of months. None of the kids ever got a detailed explanation, though I don’t remember ever asking for one either. My father would just announce it in the morning.
He’d say the same thing every time: “Time to pull up posts. There’s a patch of heaven out there with our name on it, and this ain’t it.”

I finally rolled the cylinder to the part of the fence I climbed over. I was sweating by then and it chilled me in an ugly way. Fucking winter. Fucking Grateful Dead hippie assholes. (even if I was one)
This is what they did, and had been doing for as long as I could remember: they’d steal Nitrous cylinders, put em in their truck or van, and get fucked up on the nitrous while following the tour.
In certain stretches of the American highway, after a tour, you’d see the empties in the ditches by the side of the road, like one long chain of evidence to the crime- my generation’s crime. The companies who made the gas had 800 numbers on the side just for that reason alone. People could return the cylinder for a small reward. None of us ever did it, of course. We were long gone by then, getting fucked up in another city with The Dead.

“How are we going to get it over, Tucker?”
“Glad you asked.”
From beneath his large winter coat, Tucker produced a pair of bolt cutters and began working at the fence.
“Jesus, FUCK, Tucker, why did you make me climb the fence if you had those things?”
Sue was off somewhere in her own world, muttering about a continental breakfast and HBO. By now her tears had dried up and the skin under her eyes looked pinched and frozen. It probably was.
“If the fuzz had showed up while you were in there, we all would have been sunk. Now let’s just get a move on. This fucking wind is KILLING me, kid.”
He finished cutting the fence and we rolled the cylinder through it and to the pick-up.
After considerable effort and multiple attempts, we managed to get it in the back, nestled between a supply of wet fire-wood and a broken wheel-barrow. It was pretty snug. It might have been empty after all, but I didn’t care. I was bone-cold.

The three of us climbed into the truck and drove away.
Tucker jacked the heater to high. People who never really lived through winters wouldn’t understand the utter relief of a blasting heater and the camaraderie of people furiously rubbing their hands together in the space where the bottom of the windshield ends and the dash begins, grinning like loons and almost feeling drunk from that warmth.

After a while, we all began to thaw out and feel slightly human again.
We were at least 800 miles north of the tour, and had a long drive ahead of us.
Tucker was thinking of waffles, I was thinking about slingshots again, and Sue was thinking about that bed in the Radisson and watching re-runs of Family Feud, and waiting for the warm, clean bathtub to fill up.
---

1- for a wife that is my equal, peer, and soul mate... NOT my keeper or judge or mother.
2- for a daughter who is talented and brilliant and driven by her artistic impulses NOT an airhead consumer afflicted by the plague of what a woman should be
3- friends that I can count on... NOT friends that I count on all the time
5- family that is kind... and NOT the family that is not

That's all.