Monday, August 29, 2011

Sinister Mystery Cloud




I was babbling to Dennison about hurricanes I've seen in Texas and Florida when a flash came back to me like a strange pain in the prostate that you can't explain...
And the flash was a vision, maybe a worm hole eclipse, of my brother and I in Maine or NH playing a game...I thought it was called Hurricane...but then I remembered, no, that particular game involved a hurricane or "sinister mystery cloud" but it was called "Bermuda Triangle". You rolled dice to move in that drunken circle and once in a while you would spin the board of something and depending on the outcome you would move the storm. And the storm was on a grid and if your boat was near the storm then magnets would suck the boat in and that was it for you and the crew. But you have more than one ship so you try again...

This was a memory that I guess I have kept safe in my box of nostalgia that women with their evil designs and men with their grotesque ethics CAN NOT OPEN. But since the reaper has knocked on my door more than once this trip I think I can safely share it. We're playing the game and my brother or father move the hurricane slowly across the grid and it nears my ship and my excitement, not anxiety or fear, but genuine excitement is greater than a class 4 Tropical storm named Oggy. Maybe I'm wearing Red Sox pajamas and maybe my mother is present nearby. I don't know. But my excitement at the ominous and inexorable movements of this storm fix me to the moment...it is life or death, the whim of the storm...the fate of Neptune, the delicate touch of God that may forever suck me into the abyss.

This game haunts me now in the reaches of my van. The rain came last night and I, naked, fought with it and the many leaks I can't fix. My eye is nearly clear enough to drive again though I would instantly take a job here in St. Anthony if offered. Maybe a population of 3000, honest folks, don't lock doors, work hard and raise families with neighbors working together. When your work only benefits your neighbor then there is never the class warfare that has carpenters on hourly wages for strangers who desire sun decks. That's an abomination that is foreign to the people of St. Anthony. The idea you would bid on a job to work for a stranger who made their money in E-commerce is grotesque to them like the idea of private property is to the Esquimaux. I'd open a music shop with free lessons with any purchase of instrument. The streets would be filled with penny whistle melodies and concertina tunes.

For now, I await the destiny of the mystery cloud to pass and possibly suck my metallic 1969 econoline van with all its leaks and flaws and flakes of flesh dug into the worn Indian rug. Will it pass close enough or allow me to pass with a roll of a 5 or 3?


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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.