The most prototypical Wyoming stretch of waterless, eternal-winter human hating environment is called the Red Desert and begins just west of Laramie from our perspective. The dominant geographic feature there is called Elk Mountain. The Natives name for it actually translates to Elk Penis or elk Dick as I recall, though I may be wrong here and I am not going to bother looking it up. I do know for a fact that Chimney Rock was called Deer Dick or Elk Dick by the indigenous, which is interesting as the two dicks are only about two hours apart by car or less than a week by foot. I have a vague memory of seeing an elk's dick in profile incidental to seeing the whole elk and they are indeed a bit more squarish than ours as I recall so the names are accurate enough. Even so and with all due awareness of Abrahamic repression etc. I can't help but find the single-mindedness here a little weird. Maybe it's only after one got out of the foothills and into the Rockies proper, where tall things become the norm or anyway form a continuous wall, that one finally ceased to envision dicks popping out of the ground here or there. Yet than again the Grand Tetons translate from French as no more and no less than the Big Tit Mountains though they really look like no such thing. They look like rocks. Really big rocks that can easily kill people trying to get over them. While the actually motherly flatlands, food producing and safely crossed, get mocked for looking dull. Fuck the mountains. Just take a picture while you're passing through and hang it on your wall instead of moving to Arizona and getting your water piped in from some abandoned uranium mine nine hundred miles away.
I've read a bit on angel lust, or as much as can be given that there's not much too it. Some dead men have erections that are just going to stay there until whenever they rot away. It is most common in cases of young violent death that bring a sudden stop from healthy straight to dead. There are even cases of hanging victims ejaculating at the moment of death and I mean judicial ones not the accidental suicides who were trying to do that. It all reveals a new angle on the appeal of war or the romantic aura around violence I suppose. Fading out from cancer at eighty five doesn't make anybody cum. And if we were to achieve a world of unbroken equality and peace there is the old question of what then? What does anyone do? What does anyone feel besides fine? Who do generations distinguish themselves from each other if everything is always fine? I'm afraid that we would have to keep a few bloodsports going at the very least; auto racing, bullfighting, American football or even mountain climbing if one simply must be one of those pricks. But only if they really do sustain themselves on Mountain Dew and Slim Jims none of that Gatorade shit. And they must by law own a snowboard with a bootlegged image of Not Bart Simpson on it to use as they will. They do not have to board per se but they have to have one.
Some years ago there was a demonstration in London in which a young Muslim man held up a sign that read "Freedom Go To Hell". The image has become a meme among the Western right, offered as "proof" that Islam itself is intrinsically hostile to "us". But I think such honesty might clear the air a bit from white Christian authoritarians. They say that they love freedom because that's a social norm here that one is "supposed" to abide. But the plain truth is that a free society is simply one that denies any obligation to guide the individual to the Golden Path. A shared understanding of ultimate truth and how or if it applies to day-to-day life is not what societies are for and not what they should be for. A nation is nothing more grand than an agreement among a historically accidental cross-section of living people to be one. The nation is not here to fill any existential hollowness with superhuman ancestral wisdom or to make us part of some Great Epic of history. The only thing that makes this hollowness "post-modern" or in any other way new is that reminders that other beliefs and lifestyles exist and that we could have been anyone else or more intensely constant than before. But no one intends to throw out the technologies that provide such reminders. We just keep seeking the same bullshit purity and the same meaningless tree-pissing "victory". Freedom does not promise happiness or fulfillment. to anyone. Society is not a Superfamily where one can always count on being accepted through the power of shared belief and customs. The nation is not a Superself that makes one history's all powerful lead character. Freedom is just freedom. You'll probably be less miserable with it than you'd be in some steampunk spyocracy and that's all you are guaranteed.
I once heard a friend say that he didn't like Salt Lake City because it was 'really gentrified' which is factually wrong because it implies that someone had actively gentrified the place at some time after Brigham Young himself when nah. Exaggeratedly clean is what Salt Lake has always been about from the very start. Though this does unnerve and the gigantic city blocks are obnoxious for sure.
As a Platte valley Catholic the word "alien" has always been the most galling half of the phrase "illegal alien" to my eyes. I'm still young enough that the sound of ranchera music has "always" been as normal around the neighborhood as country or classic rock from the stereos of driveway mechanics. The fact that a majority-christian European-language speaking people are declared with a straight face to be "non-western" or otherwise incompatible with out ways is beyond absurd and betrays that those who are hostile to immigration are exactly this and no more. That they are not actually concerned with legalities or some mysterious measure of civilly responsible assimilation. It is nothing more than the illusion of society being a superfamily where sameness supposedly guarantees blind personal acceptance as a good fellow from the sames. I recall as well the out-sized influence of Texas on this thing, the socioeconomic dominance there of Anglo minorities over Latino majorities especially south of Interstate 10 and the fear of losing that power.
Yet then again I also think of Freud's "Narcissism of small differences" theory to explain the bad blood between the English and Scottish and it occurs that we do not actually see Latin America as a post-imperial culture heavily parallel to our own except Spanish. Latin Americans are the
foreigners we are most familiar with and it is precisely because of this that we tend to see them not as themselves but as Foreignness itself; not as Coca-Cola loving Catholics but as every antipodal nomad who has ever bewildered us on the Discovery channel. This is bad. It is wrong and I do not mean to excuse racism in any way but it is very funny too.
I confess to having once smoked a half-packet of K2 that someone had dropped on the sidewalk over the course of a weekend. It is indeed a very deadening high sadly predicable moral panics about "new" drugs notwithstanding. I've heard that they spray motor oil and worse things on the green carpet base and I recall very little about the weekend except that it was last summer or the one before that. A mother and son who owned a headshop on south 27th that I frequented long ago, across multiple generations of owners, have gotten in trouble for selling K2 with the knowledge that it would be smoked. They face the possibility of about fifty years in jail each. Now of course they know that they were selling a hard drug that would be used as such and it is just that they face some trouble for shady business habits but get the fuck out with that fifty years shit. Meanwhile the sheriff of Chappell, astride the Denver/Cheyenne interstate junction, cries all the way to the bank about how busy he is with weed tourists who cannot stand driving the speed limit through the high plains.
No comments:
Post a Comment