Tuesday, November 25, 2014

When The Music's Over

Oggy crouched on the sandy uplift above the nude beach pondering the cascading waves and ant colonies of the crumbling bluff, dual activities that could hold the mystery to life. The sun appeared to descend toward the sea; intuitively, the sun set, but science had proved the sun does not move, it is stationary in the universe, at least in the immediate solar system, and the Earth revolves and also orbits, a circle within a circle, possibly within an even larger circular revolution of the solar system among other systems, in relationship to a mysterious center, ever magnifying Man's misfortune. Intuition was incorrect...and this failure of perception was a topic that haunted Oggy's cold nights. What other propositions, he wondered, had his perception misled him on?  What other mistakes had his undeveloped ape senses made in favor of the easy answer, and a hard question?

"What have they done to the Earth? What have they done to our sister?"

Oggy heard this distant question, asked years earlier by Jim Morrison, recorded and reclaimed, preserved and inherited by the new generation. A stereo played a magnetic memory. Morrison's anger was honest in that stoned and newborn mind sense of the 1960s...and also naive, sadly perplexed, inaccurate, metaphorically imprecise...these accusations are enunciated so clearly that the presentation became as important as the message. Gone was Connie Francis, The Virginal Fleetwoods all dressed in white, bloodless black and white images, the grey and sepia, Johnny Horton, the major key marching eunuchs of the Eisenhower Autumn.

"Music is your only friend. Until the end."

Read between the lines of poetry, the butterfly's scream is as loud as the last ray of light from the sun shining on cypress branches in Freedom Park, the shadows push the homeless east against their will, back to the shelters of despair, the surplus bus lockers, the dirty newspaper alleys, storm drainage to the levee where the damp darkness absconds on distemper horseback, little paws leading back to the source of all misery....long cold nights in the forest, the lizards and banana slugs recoiling in cold blooded survival from the night. Moths fly to the flame but humans lack wings so sink into the  deep sleep. We would soar to the sun as well with rockets on our backs, to drink the heat and evaporate in the blinding gases of our glorious source.

"Cancel my subscription to the Resurrection"

LDS missionaries knocking on doors So trite, so flippant. The resurrection is not an invitation you can decline, it's not a magazine sold by priests

A driftwood beach fire was being extinguished as the nudists found their sandy peasant skirts and the ocean doused the blackened wood...smoke then spinning up the bluff to Oggy's creepy perch. Woodfire smoke was an assault on Oggy's sense, a primitive reminder of danger and warmth. Rabbits raised in captivity nevertheless cringe when they see the shadow of a raptor on the ground, though the shadow is a cardboard cutout the lab scientists use to prove their point. The rabbits have never seen a real hawk nor do they know what the claws would feel like in their neck, but they still hide. What genetic atom carries that information or is it intuitive...like the false orbit of Morrison's embattled earth?

These topics were the primary colors with which Oggy then mixed and blended searching for the unifying amalgam that would solve the torment he had inherited from Morrison like the Rabbit seeking shelter when fake raptor shadows danced on the lab floor...Oggy also bounced celestial checks when trying to renew his subscription to the apocalypse. He mixed the colors, he mixed on a mental palette because intuition suggested these were all unrelated, coinciding only in Oggy's troubled mind, but intuition was wrong; had not the sun proven intuition untrustworthy, wasn't there a mystery in the multi-colored array of these mystical topics? So, with distrust as his booster fuel, Oggy mixed the white woodsmoke with the dark brown of the cypress bark....alas too tender and vapor-clouded a result, intangible, caught by the foggy updraft. So he took the blue from the peasant dress worn by the woman climbing up the bluff with the yellow on the roller coaster car....resulting in a green found in small specks on the screaming butterfly wings...which was closer to the source of everything but exclusive, not a unity. The missing tint was a tone found on faded photos from 1963, grainy, torn, mixed with hounds tooth gabardine. A man on the beach wore a purple linen shirt and Oggy thought hatefully that he must be from San Jose, that loathsome city to the East, forever hidden in the shadows of the Santa Cruz mountains, spared the fog of the ocean, drinking the residue from the ion implanters, the safety laser locks, poisonous high tech soup, the...Oggy's concentration had slipped, his peace was shattered by that damn linen shirt. Oggy wondered why he couldn't wear a linen shirt and look good. Even a normal color, not even purple. But no, he'd never look as comfortable as the man on the nude beach partially hidden behind the white smoke from the extinguished fire. Did ants feel vanity? Did the roller coaster altitude undulate with the same regularity as Oggy's self-esteem? Were the waves correspondent or harmonious?

"I hear a very gentle sound, very near yet very far."

The man in the purple linen shirt turned the music off. Waves plundered the shore like pirates on a blood rib. The distant lighthouse cast a gazing ray toward the approaching fog, before the long shadow cast by the drowning stars and that golden artificial ray was white like rabbit fur and friendly as a lab technician's coat fabric. Was the light turning around the peak or was the world revolving around the pure straight beam? These colors combined into the concrete aggregate found in the sewage drains, the interior of the bus lockers where Oggy's folk songbook lay with his socialist literature. There were similarities found everywhere and none of it was intuitive so Oggy embraced the trance. He could solve the puzzle of a thousand faces, the colors losing their turf to the darkness except for the periodic moment the lighthouse orbit favored them. The music was over but the music had now begun.

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