The twenty-something mom with a wad of bills, who choked out her fate, as the plane soared over Mt. Shasta’s lava rivulets, still visible after endless centuries of rain and gravity, snatched her drink from the server, and muttered thanks. In unison we uplifted our plastic cups and slurped, uttering satisfied ahhs as the poison hit home, thining the brain’s blood. She’s single again, looking, it would seem, a huge rock on her finger the man to my left notices, and wonders about. He buys her a drink about six laughs into her naturual ebulence, fueled by a burning desire to be liked, and a flirty need to touch people, as if she didn’t mean anything by it. What the hell; we all like it; why not? By Crater lake we lounged into our buzz, and the melting snowcaps fountain light back, the shadow of the plane whispering dark, as she shows us her stretch marks. I like that. Honesty is best; her horror of them is offset by her non-chalance.


Acutely beautiful, she is... I look to my right at the strip mined forests, and gasp—the clouds are attempting to hide the brutality; the replanted land screams monoculture, lake after lake of overpasturized milk, designed for fallout shelters. Are we drinking bloody marries now? I can’t help noticing you’re wearing a cheap, chain mail g-string jutting fromn the too-tight jeans, that prepregnancy fit you. Oh hell; the clear cuts are flower fields; imagine all the repressed art, until fires destroy the over head canopy, like the country now, etc. The best way to burn someone, is smear them with glitter; she was my very first woman, fucking around ... the sex was too good, what can I say? I held off for a year, he never caught on. He was a bus driver. I examine her lip stud, and imagine why it’s here; the clouds part to revere mount Adams; Cascadia, America radiates its fuck-you independence; didn’t I tell you not to shout that at me?! Nevertheless, the logging continues, and yes, I was an alcoholic, but the baby stopped that; I stippled my eyes to the blinding light of a late May sun roaring in through the opposite window, "I don’t know, she was an artist or some shit; she was crazy." I like crazy people the Knute Rockney style post Frat boy age forty said, and she laughed. Well, shit. I suppose I do too. She’s working it bit by bit big time he’s surmising her with surveyor eyes, wounded southern gentleman to the core.


I must confess, I like being like this. The moment is all pervasive; the type of men I always long for, are all tabooed, and tough thru, stewardess, do we have time for another round? I feel sorry for the married couple opposed us, judging our hallowed hilarity. This, the curse of the mythic beautiful girlfriend, who legitimizes herself to wife, mother, and matriarch. We are ignorant children drinking and laughing our lifetimes away, torn an d tortured by that which we do not have. Saint Helens the ancient instrument howling the void, to the folds of valleys beneath it, fifty nine degrees, one hundred and ten miles to fly unless you’re going to Spokane with us. Sin: she has so much energy, she fairly vibrates; the courage to be curious is not rewarded, where jealousy is converted to hate, and emblematic curios of envy. Tragically, most everyone of note on the plane, is boring. They have little to nigh idea how to envelop the moment, and live.


Planes eventually decent the drop the oil to lubricate women men the orgasm is different. I have situated myself in the seat of higher learning, next to unhinged beings brimming with life. The clouds we knife at five hundred miles per hour are perception , as we bank around a thunder head. What’s this doing here? You know how a cup inside a very, but not quite melted cup of ice, when you arrive at the bottom, spills al over you? I mean, you aren’t even drunk, but the plastic piles up, and what else do you do with it?


You know, I want to tell my beautiful girl/boyfriend that I love her/him, and I do, don’t get me wrong, but they he she won’t can’t can is afraid to understand the world is too large, too big the love is under over above. I wanted to not but I had to. The power of wanting and obtaining ... she said, three minutes max. I thought: no wonder I’m fucked up. The first beauty that walks down the street—I wonder. I can’t gel with nest, it’s a general narrowing. Am I skewed, or it defines itself as a gender thing? Hardly my friend—it’s age old. It’s the want-you thing; no amount of it is sufficient, egos all lurch towards it, you know the drill. Direct hits become misses; it’s all in who and why, not facts assembling themselves into coherent holes we can measure. I feel that hole, and he enthusiastically tries to describe it; how can we meet there? Once you troll for opposites, nothing else will do.


So that’s how we understood each other; a fleeting sunburst illuminated the window’s cobwebs, floaters swam lazily in damaged retinas, and the sound of termites chomping was barely audible. Did you know they choose wood by the sound of it, when they bite it? She suddenly offered. The fleeting brilliance, mottled by clouds’ dance, hypnotized me to her voice. They choose wood by it’s size, she trailed on, as if reminding the creator of his/her work. They eat it like playing song, whose resonance agrees with them. So you’re saying ... you could fake them out, by vibrating the wood at a different rate? Apparently, that’s true. I spend a long time appreciating how welcoming, and serene she is. A small songbird sits on her shoulder, feathers fluffed and eyes closed; a moving truck backs into a pole, and we hear a crunch.


The week before, there had been a lot of screaming, and wild bouts of accusation. I read in the same paper, nicotine appears to make women think more like men, such as it’s possible to say that— knowing as little as we do about thinking. In consideration of Lenny Bruce, I’d fielded the hail of abuse, knowing it hit home somewhere, it’s shocking volume a procedure of my resistence. The now-infamous Phil Spector claimed Bruce died of an overdose of police, never mind the dump truck of powders and financial worries. I’m simply a post; a mirrored obstacle people hit, and yelp, with the pains of past pains unreconciled. I am a convenient thing to be injured upon, for I facilitate integration, and right myself from the damage their blind spot hits me with. I welcome destruction, in a way, being invisible ... as mediums are untrained shamans, channeling chaotic forces without the ritualism to divide good from bad, self from the whole, and clear from muddy. She’s a vixtress and saint in one, a subtle and brutal wielder of power, mostly against herself.


Women’s bodies are resonant shapes men check for morphic potential; how would I vibrate with her? What would the result mean? Later : How do/will I extricate myself from this frequency? So the ball counsels the players smashing it obverse to themselves, over the net. Creativity and expression or anger and love are complicated affairs. The focus which allows us to exist is beyond the polar opposites we ascribe to; the simple breath we absorb to exhale is a divinity we ignore to persist upon our courses as automatons, judging all which seems to conflict with our puny notions of the expansive sides of ourselves. Each fraction of a moment’s moment, is inter-locuting with innumerable bubbles of quantum foam we’d call fate, or randomness ... the idea we’re re-engineering old knowledge as such, is laughably puerile, considering how complex we’ve become.