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.
