CyberSomatics

I was sitting in the front seat, beside the shuttle driver.  I didn’t dislike him, but in order to not dislike him I had to do a little work on my inner atmosphere.  He talked incessantly to a captive audience, and when he reached a place where another, less determined, man,  might pause for reflection, the threw up a pontoon bridge.

“But be that as it may,” or,

“and, uh,” or,

“well, time passes …”

So time passes, and we flash forward from the time when land was offered to grandma for twenty-five dollars a section, with infinite detail to hesitations and pausing and lounging around the brink of refusal.   I know what the viewpoint character does not know, which is how much this land is going to appreciate.  This is the key element of suspense, and it was being built up for a splendid resolution of fortune or despair.

“Please buy the  land;  It’s going to be worth a fortune in fifty years and you’ll be the hero instead of the goat.”  I was drifting off into my own version of events to combat my boredom.  It’s like watching a dream unfolding in the same space where the rote exchanging of information is droning mechanically along.

Finally the sale goes through for millions and all the children are well off.  An ending?   No, just a pause caught at the bottom of an exhalation, and conversation begins to blossom among other three misbegotten strangers.   We got one line each.  Another story began.   I drifted back out on the thoughtline.

When I was in Crete I learned that the reason the people were so hospitable was that in their culture, the stranger is a deity paying a surprise visit.  They don’t want to make a mistake, and turn this deity away.  One man was different from the others;  at the bar he was dressed in a suit and kept apart.  I knew him as the owner of a hostel where I’d stayed a couple of days, and where there was never hot water at the promised hours.  My local  acquaintances told me he wanted to be an important person.

The driver had met quite a few famous people.  Some of the dropped names were Bruce Springstein, Neil Diamond, Paul and Linda McCartney, Linda Ronstadt, and Cary Grant.  Each of these names he had collected and saved as a collectible item.  It made me reflect on when I was about four or five, and my mother would read celebrity magazines, like, “Modern Screen.”   It also made me reflect on my own little treasures.  The image I get is a poker game.  ”I’ll see your B list asshole  and call.”  He blanches when he sees the hole card.

“Muhammad Ali.”

I didn’t have any ones so I tipped him five dollars, said goodbye to the deity, and slipped off into the sky.

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Quentin Crisp wrote that when Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were in Rome, the public lavatories had no top on them, and the people were climbing up to look at them pissing.  The solution to this, he said, is not to build higher walls around the latrine.  It is to piss with style.

Our attitude should be existential, he said, which means to swim with the tide, but faster.  If something is going to happen anyway, make yourself over to it immediately. If you can’t hide from the cameras and recorders and computers and monitors, then man up, like Letterman.   “Yes I did.  Deal with it.”

Eventually this will create an egalitarian society, as the walls between public and private fall in the famous and powerful, uniting them with the poor and disreputable.

This continues the process of unification of black and white represented in our President.  We get something that’s not either one.   We get something like Tiger Woods.  What a name that is.  Barrack Hussein’s got nothing on him.

“Tiger, as in tiger tiger burning bright, and wood, as in can we throw wood on the fire sweet sugar mama?”

“I thought it was Woods, as in, we’re lost in the woods.”

The golf club crashes through the window.  ”Let me Sweden that for you.”

The shadow shows up in every play, because when the play begins to drag you bring in a man with a gun.  The audience won’t know why he’s there but they’ll be glad he showed up.

That couple that crashed a state dinner was the man with a gun, and while the debate centers on whether they were or were not invited, there is a dreaming level where they are the trickster element in the play.

There are levels circulating around Obama, the innermost being his bodyguards, then the social secretaries who control access, another layer of security …

It’s hard to move through that layer into the inner circle, and those two people  managed to get in and get photographed with everybody.  They are duplicitous, social climbing, egoists.  That’s a part of the American psyche that had to show up because it has become defining.

Nobody out here on the line can miss it.   We see it all the time and hear it all the time, as the cameras devour those who want to be devoured, and then they learn to hang out on street corners staring at everybody with unblinking eye.  ”Is this you?”

“It does look like me, but …”

There are dire warnings about how information can be used against you.

“Did you write this?”

“Is this you in this picture?”

“We just want to know who sold it to you.”

Who can escape the cameras and recorders and computer console logs?  Your telephone can signal where you are and your credit cards leave  footprints on the highways, at gas stations and restaurants and motels.  If you find a briefcase full of cash there’s a responder in it.  You can run but you can’t hide.

There’s nothing left to do but let all the players come to the party, and own them all.

So whatever your names were, who crashed the party,  good performance.