CyberSomatics

I got back to Prescott yesterday afternoon, after a couple of weeks away.  I left on Sunday about noon and drove to Mohave, where I stopped into my usual Mohave digs.  It’s a forty dollar a night dive with HBO I’ve stayed in for years.  I decided I needed a third point in my orbital pattern, and Mohave is an interesting character in any story.  It’s where the Space Shuttle comes cruising in over the airplane graveyard.

It’s also a highway town, built along the east side of the highway, with the railroad tracks running along the west side.  Sometimes the wind blows hard enough it feels like it’s going to take off the roof, and other times it’s still until the train comes through, making the room rumble and shudder.

There was a sign on the door.  ”Office closed.”  And it gave a number to call if it was an emergency.  Well, I supposed my wanting my room at six o’clock wasn’t an emergency, but I didn’t know what was going on.  Maybe the Chinese couple that run the place were out to dinner with friends.  The Chinese man who used to run it left and opened a whorehouse, from what the new owner inferred.   I don’t care what he’s doing, he’s my friend.  I once left a roll of hundreds on the dresser in my room and he gave it back to me.  Come to think of it, that might have set him thinking about opening a whorehouse, seeing how much cash some old white men carry.

Now I’m well off enough I don’t ever have much cash in my pocket, in case you were thinking about hiding behind the fence  around which runs a path through the darkness to the liquor store next door to the motel.  I left the money in the room while I went to get some beer because I didn’t want to carry it on me.   And lest I remember it was there, I slipped it under the ice bucket.  Brilliant.

My first thought was to keep driving as it was relatively early.  But it was dark, and I wasn’t going to drive all the way to Prescott, so there wasn’t much point in going on to Barstow or Needles.  Besides, I like driving into the Mohave early in the morning with a cup of McDonald’s coffee and an aerodynamic egg on a muffin.  It’s part of the Mohave ritual.  So I decided to look around for someplace else to stay.  My only requirement was that it be no more than forty bucks.

I picked out the one that seemed to have a few extras, like HBO, and didn’t look like a set for a B horror flick.  The Indian man at the desk was pleasant enough, and the room itself was fine.  I was especially pleased with the tasteless decor, with clashing forms and colors testifying to a frugal budget.  A nice place would be suspicious for forty bucks.  The television was bigger than in the other place and the remote actually worked.  I pulled out my iPhone to get my email and was surprised to see that I had wireless internet.  It just worked, with no hassle or password.

The only problem was that it was cold in Mohave on Sunday night, and the room heater fan rumbled like a truck on jake brake.  With it on I had to jack up the volume to hear the television.  HBO had something sucky on,  so I was watching a movie on one of the testosterone channels:  Con Air, with Nickolas Cage, about some murderous convicts led by John Malkovich.  He murdered a few people before getting the bright idea of  ordering passenger Steve Buscemi, “The Marietta Mangler,” be freed from his outfit, which was the same one Hannibal the Cannibal wore when he was transported from one facility to another.  If you don’t know Buscemi, think of the skinny little  kidnapper in Fargo.  He’s a familiar face but maybe not a familiar name.

As you might imagine,  that airplane was a bad neighborhood with no exit.  Nick Cage managed to get a message to the U.S. Marshals Office by writing it on the chest of this guy whose body was stuck in the wheel well — which is why they couldn’t get the landing gear to come up all the way and were off schedule — so he he had to push him out over a city, and as a humorous aside there was this couple at a stop light complaining about a bug hitting the clean windshield … okay, you see where this is going …

I had put a half bottle of red wine, some pocket bread and pears in the back of the truck when I left San Francisco,  and I got them out and had a little repast while I watched the movie.  Another thing this other place had was a coffee maker, so yesterday morning I made a pot of coffee and watched the news before heading out into the desert, instead of going to McDonald’s.  Instead I stopped at the Starbuck’s in Barstow for an egg salad sandwich and latte as provisions for the drive to Needles.  You can drive forty or fifty  miles without seeing signs of civilization on that stretch of I-17.

There was an accident on the highway between Barstow and Needles, and the traffic on the Interstate was eerily sparse.  The electronic sign at Barstow said all eastbound lanes were blocked.   I figured by the time I got there they would have it cleared but they didn’t.   The only way around it was on side roads, including a stretch of Route 66.    I put on the genius and got a country playlist seeded off of “Close Up the Honky Tonks” by Dwight Yokum off his Dwight sings Buck album. Then I relaxed into a back road adventure.  It’s more kicks on 66.

The shooter was first dead and then he was alive and stable.  There were three shooters and then there was one.  The picture gradually clarified into the face of a Palestinian man who is a member of the Muslim faith whose family tried to dissuade him from going into the army.  They had a bad feeling about it.  ”They call us camel jockeys and sand niggers.”

But he went anyway and got through medical school and became a psychiatrist, and then he wanted out, because the deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan caused him a lot of cognitive dissonance.  If he was the object of disrespect because he’s an Arab, and if he doesn’t want to cut himself off from his mythology as an Arab man … well, you get the idea.   Joseph Campbell said that a culture, or civilization, can survive anything except the loss of its underlying myth.  America can survive anything except Americans who can’t tolerate the loss of their previous underlying myth.

In America we make a deal with people.  In exchange for the primacy of the myths they bring with them from  their old world, we give them a new mythology, which can be found at the barber shop.  You get your hair cut according to when you came in. Now men go to salons and have an appointment so the analogy doesn’t hold up so well, but the traditional barber shop was the secret church of the American dream, and it’s alive everywhere you take your number and wait your turn, same as everyone else.  No cutting to the front of the line, even if you’re the archduke.

And all the time,  we’re trying to keep this alive so that we have something real to trade for these other mythologies.  Freedom is an abstract.  To one person freedom means being armed with enough firepower to take out an aviary, while to another it means accepting a high level of violence and homicide in exchange for the support of the munitions manufacturers and their lobbyists.  Sometimes they’re the same person, like Dick Cheney for example.  But having the right of habeas corpus is real, and so is the right to eat lunch without becoming a two dimensional character in somebody else’s ideological nightmare.

Obviously this Palestinian psychiatrist was smart enough to get through medical school, and he was promoted to Major.  It was expected that he had traded in the old country’s mythology for his American Dream  of a place where there’s not much point in praying five times a day to a god with way too much time on his hands.  ”I’m sorry, an omelet is made with potatoes, not tomatoes.”   A god who’s got it all set in stone has an obvious propensity to turn everything into stone, and if you make spirit solid it isn’t spirit anymore.

If god  becomes one of those old people who use the bank teller as a social life, business comes to a halt and things fall apart.  In America we have potentially elevated the citizen to a level once accessible only to kings, where the man and the god are the same size, and can finally see eye to eye.

With that kind of relationship you can get some practical information, such as, “Never trust a religious psychiatrist,” and, “If an Arab really doesn’t want to go to fight Arabs, don’t send him, especially if he’s a psychiatrist.  Didn’t anybody here read Catch 22?”