Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Vain Hobo Coughs Up Bloody Phlegm


No more excuses, thought Oggy, as the rain breached his final defenses, the tarp made of dream fabric and recycled self torment, bound by Lenin-stitches and Marxist thread. The bay leaf stump was not going to be the end of his fruit and nut utopia, no. In fact, the entire pre-conceived cliché, his use of the philosophically commercialized term “Project” to describe his activities was part of the problem. The roots, Socrates wisely taught, were always the ultimate source of failure or success and Oggy’s fruit and nut utopia project was no different. Once Oggy had defined the objective as a “project” then it could never evolve into a reality. It was a project, like a defeated era of the 1960s, an experiment in idealism, media-enhanced, subjugated by commercial terms, co-opted, ethically plagiarized from a failed and poisoned culture and that was why it had failed to gain support. The re-imagined Fruit and Nut Collective began to hover on the immediate horizon of Oggy’s soggy vision, mice and earth worms forming his immediate army. The disdainful golf course crawling with pastel pants and false teeth, the elitist and whore-filled crystal clubhouse, the awful, disgraceful “seafood” restaurant, literally buried in the rotting corpses of crustaceans and coerced butter sauce, must be appropriated for future generations…Oggy saw no other solution. The land was ideal for the Collective and had access to the seaside mansions that would also be appropriated for common housing during the revolution. The cursed elite of Santa Cruz were snug in their usurped houses while the exploited Ohlone Indians crouched in homeless shelter tents…the forecast called for Justice.
Oggy winced gravely as he shifted his meatless hips on the bed of crushed redwood leaves and re-purposed artichoke leaves. His throat was raw with disappointment and bacteria but his eyes remained focused on the future where love songs were authentic, sung around a healing fire, the light pollution that obscured the stars would be part of a discredited past. The alternative, Oggy knew, was a continued decline into a commoditized psuedo-culture where the indiscriminate price tag and the catchy slogan on the painted lips of the trashy spokeswoman was gospel to a bewildered congregation of flash mob boot lickers and pop culture tampon dispensers; fruit flavored toiletries, pre-tarnished jewelry, travel-sized ethics, lion shredded jeans, bears shitting out coffee beans for the smug elite morning cups. Oggy shuddered from acute disgust: Civilization was already collapsing, obviously, as the divide between the elite and the field hands grew more and more obtuse. So, against all odds, he would rally support for the fruit and nut collective, the antithesis of the awful decline into internet masturbation chat rooms and fertile land forever poisoned by dental products and wasted, rotting IHOP pancakes.
In the morning, rain or shine, throbbing prostate pain or not, Oggy vowed to camp outside City Hall, abstain from food, surviving only on the plentiful rainwater, until he could impress upon the blind Council members that the golf course property must be returned to the starving people. Oggy’s legs had fallen asleep in the crooked positing the tree stump forced him to lay and his neck ached and his prostate pulsed with infection and alarm…all these details gave him strength because a fight was only worth fighting if the stakes were life and death. Oggy had his Spanish Street School to consider, and the weekly vegetable pickup at the Farmer’s Market and his piano recital at the nursing home, but he believed these playful activities would not hinder his important mission to further the advancement of ultimate submission by the unconscionable dominant McGovernment. God, everything Oggy thought sounded like a manifesto, but he couldn’t help it. He was vain, he admitted and his pine bough mattress was an awful affront to environmental sovereignty. He might as well have dug up a cemetery and build a hammock factory on the rotting bones of Spanish priests.

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