Health Care

It was a long drive to the only available homeless walk-in clinic. I shuffled in with my hobo gloves on, my eyes having nearly gone blind due to fiberglass damage and advanced blepheritis. I wandered through the north St. Louis crowds of kids too sick to go to school and men too cold to stand outside. A television showed a new Elmer Fudd/loony tunes cartoon. I didn't take a day off of work to get there but it had taken three weeks to work up the nerve to try to get medicine for my eyes.
"You see, I was on the coast of Labrador and I got an infection in my eye..." I began once I finally had a jury of a single woman in a white coat, and I don't think the doctor heard much after that. I went on to describe how my eyesight was in danger of failure this past summer and how the medicine I received at the Grenfell Mission Hospital saved my eye and made me a lifelong devotee of Grenfell and his social equity reinvestment program that seems so out of favor with the cow farmers and meth dealers of America. I didn't mention the meth dealers to the doctor but she was already playing with the red security button under her desk as I began to get worked up while describing my quest to find the arctic wolf and learn if the climate instability was endangering it or its fragile habitat.
"And if we're at 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide and 10,000 televisions filled with lead go obsolete and are dumped into rivers leading to Korea or the polluted pacific ocean then..."
The doctor patiently eyed my wild hands in their ragged gloves.
"Honey, what's wrong wit you?" she asked.
"The wolf...for one...and then there are the nuns burning themselves in Tibet. BURNING THEMSELVES IN TIBET! While people line up at Steak N Shake for shitty french fries and chicken. What kind of industrial food nightmare are we trapped in??"
"But you come in here...you white...you live around here?"
"I'm looking for the wolf!"
"Honey, you got a home to go to?"
"I have a lead on a farm in Guatemala...a collective farm."
"Collective? What they collecting?"
"No, they cooperate."
"Then call it a cooperative farm."
"But collectivism is the political ideology they ascribe to..."
She shook her head and eyed her computer for the next appointment.
"Naw. You not talking sense."
A fire truck rushed by on the street followed by a speeding police car. The patients continued their texting and crying and rubbing of worn necks in the raw mid west wind, sleet hitting the windows, broken water fountains dribbling water like shrunken urethra of the soul.
"Ok. I'll start from the beginning. There once was the band of Indians known as the Kickapoo."
"Naw...."
"And the Chippewa. There's a street here named Chippewa but it was originally the name of a tribe of native Americans who lived as one with the wolf...and as one with the earth."
"I'm gonna stop you right there. Honey, we got sick patients waiting out there. I can't listen to no lecture on Native American History."
"No, that's the back story to my quest to find the wolf that led to my eye injury that led to my getting the medicine that cured an entirely different malady. Can't you see this terrible affliction in my eyes?"
She squinted at me.
"You eyes don't look red. They look fine."
"But they suffer me so. They ail me. And the wolf doctor...I mean the shaman...I mean the Labrador collectivist medicine man gave me ointment."
"Labrador? Where's that?"
"North of Newfoundland."
She shrugged her shoulders.
"Near Greenland," I added.

"Uh huh. This wolf doctor, what was his name?"
"Wilfred Grenfell. Sir Wilfred Grenfell. He was English."
"Ok. What did he give you?"
"This!"
I reached into my insulated overalls and from the worn and mended cargo pockets of my wolf quest uniform I retrieved the tattered box of Optymixin, the magical ointment, made from now eradicated rain forest bark, that healed my eyes. I held the box out for the doctor to take. She hesitantly leaned toward me but refused to touch the box. She looked at the box.
"Uh huh."
My fingers were still shaking from the freezing 14 mile trip through the snow storm on my 1974 Vespa Ciao moped to reach the clinic. The angry encounters I had on that trip and the return trip numbered in the thousands. Luckily I had strapped my tent to the moped because it would be days before I saw my van again.

I shook the box. "This cured my eye of the infection that blinded me during my wolf quest!"
I smiled. I nodded. I rattled the empty Optymixin box. I coughed.
"Wolf quest? Honey, you strange. Where you questing wolves?"
"Ellesmere Island. That's the last place the arctic wolf lives. And it's melting!"
"Uh huh. And you went there?"
"No, it was a failure. But..."
"I ain't surprised. You try to ride that motorized bicycle?"
"My 1974 Vespa Ciao moped?"
We both eyed it through the window where the sleet piled upon the crooked front wheel. My half helmet had fallen on the ground and was filled with snow.
"Whatever it is."
"No. I took my van. I drove as far as I could but..."
"But lost your eyesight. Then the medicine man gave you the cure?"
Her tone was less than convinced.
"It's a long story. I'm making a documentary of it."
"You filmed it?"
"I did. Mostly the footage is of me under the van fixing broken hoses and belts but there are a few reindeer and fox. And I lived on an Island that's a restored Cod Fishing village. That's where the eye went bad."
"That right?"
"Yes. But the eye."
"Ah, the eye."
"My eyes have gotten worse and worse. I need the medicine."
"Well, the doctor can't see you today."
"I thought you were the doctor."
She laughed.
"The doctor called in sick. How about you make an appointment for tomorrow?"
"I've been here for 6 hours watching Loony Tunes."
"You busy? You got plans with your scooter? Any wolves to quest after in St. Louis?"
"No, but every morning my eyes get worse."
"Look fine to me."
A child screamed outside. I heard a woman say, "That's what you get..." I cleared my throat.
"Well, see, that puts me in a position of having to wait until my eyes are really bad and then get an appointment and then wait three weeks and six hours to see a doctor to prove my eyes are falling apart. Gee, I hope the doctor can see me when the skin is falling off of them!"
"Ain't that a shame."
"And I can't prove it because they don't look too bad today."
"Like I said..."
"Please give me the Optymixin."
I rattled the empty box again.
"Naw. The doctor will give you what he thinks you need."
"Do you want to see my toe?"
"Why? Wolf bite it?"
"No, I was processing lobsters in Maine and..."
"Wait, you was on the wolf quest in Greenland with an English doctor and now you processing lobsters in Maine? You get around on that bicycle."
"I'm not lying. I'm telling you that I was blinded in Labrador during my wolf quest. I survived because of the knighted English doctor and then I got a job grading Nova Scotia lobsters for shipment to New Years feasts in Milan, Italy. During said lobster job I injured my hands and back and pulverized my arthritic toe until all the flesh was torn from it and it seeped mucus for three weeks. It's currently weeping blood. Then I was harassed and threatened in Maine by the Walmart Gestapo so I drove across the country on Main street to get here because I'm going to find a collective farm in Guatemala..."
The woman laughed but I blundered on.
"But along the way all the flesh started to fall off my eyelids! AND I NEED THE OPTYMIXIN TO SAVE THE WOLVES."
She laughed and laughed until I felt my pride was at stake so I stood up and walked out. The patients in the waiting room looked at me like I was wearing clothes made from eel tongue.
"Alright, I'm the asshole." I said and limped to my 1974 Vespa Ciao moped. It started up and I fought the snow and sleet until I finally merged into traffic on Interstate 64. Someone honked their horn at me and I would've given them the finger but the front wheel wobbles so severely on the moped that I had to satisfy myself with yelling, "Go to hell!"
Then I realized I was going in the wrong direction and that I had left the damn empty Optymixin box in the clinic office.

Oak Leaves Fall on Deer Shit

Oggy reached down between his knees and found the old rusted bumper that was jamming into his atrophied ankle and scraping the skin off. He held it up to the sharp light of the California afternoon, blinding and revealing in its honest appraisal of the teeming land and folly of man.
"So this is what was..."
"I was gonna put that back on," screamed the pot dealer as he used his elbows to steer the rattling car around a sharp turn in the Mendocino oak hills, using his hands to light a glass pipe that had glowing skeleton eyes. "I'm gotta get my Mig welder back from my neighbor, that fucking pud-wacker."
The driver added, "I ought to put everything in here for sale and buy a new jeep! What you think, honey?"
The woman in the back seat ignored him as she tickled her child under the chin. Oggy placed the bumper remnant aside and scratched his bleeding ankle. The anxiety of the reckless driving and the baby wailing from the back seat combined with the constant bickering from the woman holding the infant and the man driving had made him numb and twitchy, out of sorts, as though the proximity to San Francisco elevated his nervous condition so every twisting mile equated bulging veins and dripping Oggy sweat. Was he grinding his teeth? Yes. When had he started? Hours or minutes ago? Drugs lead you to a precipice and shadows below a ravine, anonymous death at the hands of dealers with deadlines. Safer not to leave your bedroom, watch the world from the branches of a local tree, take notes but don't get involved. What was in San Francisco that he needed to make this arduous and deadly journey? He couldn't remember. It was the thrill...the adventure, a death wish, movement, the need to see what the world was up to...a quest to fill this emptiness in his codependent heart? All of that rolled like a spliff and ignited with the hellfire of sin.
"Go ahead! Talk to that neighbor of yours. And while you're at it you can tell him that if he trespasses one more time I will shoot him between the eyes."
Oggy chuckled uneasily, unsure of the resentful depth of the remark. "Shoot him between the eyes." It was something a nameless villain would say in a spaghetti western. His stomach grumbled with the hollowness of a wet kettle drum in the back of the orchestra being beaten with soaked newspaper. When would he be able to eat again? Was that sandwich shop in dusty Healdsburg or Santa Rosa? Oh, he prayed that he wouldn't get stuck in Santa Rosa again...the land of concrete and long sidewalks past tool rental shops and video stores. Neon windows with corporate edibles, banned by Oggy's strict values, were all that Santa Rosa offered along with crystal meth and career colleges stashed behind low level urban sprawl.
"I've always wanted to live on a farm and subsist," said Oggy as his eyes widened in alarm and helplessness at the widening maw of death awaiting them all in a woody chasm directly ahead. The driver was distracted by the lighter having fallen between the emergency brake handle and the broken stereo. Oggy reached out and held dug his fingers into the decaying plastic interior, the sun-baked foam deteriorating like dry tobacco in his hand.
"We're gonna die!"
The driver looked up at the last second and swerved to the left, the rear tires squealing an octave below the high pitched wail of the child. The woman lashed Oggy's ears with insults and vindictive resentments.
"You....told....grandmother....stuff...see..." was all he heard. Let me live, he thought. Let me live and I'll turn my life around and make something of my self. I'll be productive. I'll belly up to the neon bar, I'll shake hands with the one armed bandit of corporatized, broker/dealer America. I'll study harder on the piano and teach small children to appreciate music of Handel and Mozart. I'll be a beacon of light in their dark and rainy days. I'll rise above the madness.
Oggy also considered this: if he were to die with these three cannabis farmers in an epic car crash into a ravine with body parts of babies flying around the car interior with broken bumpers rusting from neglect and Oggy's ravaged belt and arm pits along with the driver's bad breath and the woman's milk-full breasts, that would be a noteworthy event, and since Oggy had not participated in many noteworthy events he felt the odds were against his death only because the event itself would be out of astral alignment with his otherwise dull life. This self-constructed theory did not soothe Oggy's nerves or loosen his grip on the decaying arm rest but it did distract him long enough for the uncontrolled skid to straighten out and become a fish tail and then a controlled serpentine down the steep grade, the car narrowly missing the upturned body of a possum in the breakdown lane. Had the possum been coming or going from his woodland home? Was it an allegory for all difficult journeys that end tragically? Oggy said a prayer for the animal, for himself and the family who had picked him up off the side of the highway an hour earlier because he "looked lost". Who wasn't lost in this uncertain world? Who wasn't a gypsy navigating the trials and perils of the unforgiving jungle?
Oggy looked ahead and saw the first flat oak plains and distant vineyards that welcomed him out of the redwood region. Beyond those plains was Santa Rosa and beyond that San Francisco rose out of the earth's trembling crust, the bridges, the spires, the harbor, the wharfs, the hookers on Market and the heavy-lidded dealers of Turk Street, and the Filipino gangs with their colors and stolen hub caps. Oggy couldn't see the demons of The City but he could hear their possessed song in the wail of the infant. They were like Pagan priests returning from the holy land with a child to sacrifice to the Tenderloin Gods.
"We gotta let you out here, Oggy. Need to pit stop in town."
Oggy nodded and reached for his backpack. He fingered his beaded necklace and cleared his throat.
"Thank you for the ride."
They let him out near an abandoned trailer that, according to a weathered wooden sign, once housed "Peace Cheese" a local dairy product business. The business and owners were long gone but Oggy stood in the shade of sign and inhaled the rich aroma of tilled soil. A line of cultivated fruit and nut trees were evidence of the passing phases of a utopian dream, here on the side of Highway 101 you could wait long enough and all your enemies would pass on the asphalt, slowly dissolving into dust for possum fertilizer. Nearby, the leaves of a stunted oak tree had made a blanket for deer and Oggy saw their shit in constellations of small pebbles. Oggy inhaled and closed his eyes. Tonight he would be walking among demons on Leavenworth and Golden Gate, eating stale donuts, listening to the roar of humanity, devouring sacrificed infants, but his head now floated on the stream of dreams while the waves of fantasy lapped the gunwales of time.
A horn evicted Oggy from his rented reverie. A pickup truck had stopped since Oggy's thumb automatically went up whenever an engine passed. Oggy jogged toward the truck, water dripping from the carbureted  tail pipe.
"Where you heading," asked the driver through a maze of mustache hair.
"The City."
Oggy couldn't hear the driver's detailed explanation but the tone was that he was permitted access to the truck. Oggy climbed in and tossed his backpack on the floor.
"We gotta make one stop before Santa Rosa," said the driver, and Oggy's fate hung in the balance like a leaf poised to fall into a river destined for demon land or the dry banks of deer habitat and possum playgrounds.

Prove You are Human

Am I the only one who is tired of these things?

Don't Turn Away

"We could find that we're all alone in the dream of the proud."

Boycott China

Has anyone seen the latest videos of Tibetan nuns and monks burning themselves? Of course not, since you were too busy watching Hog hunters and Murdoch pre-packaged sloppy second circus dogs dancing around a planet some fucking 4th graders found with his sponsored iPhone. But let me recap: The country that manufactures every fucking thing in the world because their people have been sold out by their corrupt government and their land was seized and all resourced depleted and rivers dammed and streams poisoned and they are incapable of living except as the pack mules/conveyor belt to some other country's decadent dildo fantasies and Martha Stewart DOG CLOTHING! That country, China, forcibly invaded Tibet way back before you were born, evicted the Buddhist spiritual leader (as part of some secret Buddhist ritual where you are justified in slaughtering farmers as long as you wear a red star on your cap) and have subsequently held the Tibetans under their thumb using funds from Apple and Nintendo and Martha Stewart to enable soldiers to oppress and silence the peaceful Tibetans while the Dali Lama tours the world with his smile and glasses talking to ignorant Americans about the plight of his people. This would all be solved if we ceased to buy Apple products and gave China the silent treatment...INSTEAD OF NUNS BURNING THEMSELVES. There is no justification for this. These Tibetans are breaking through the wall of silence erected by the Apple Slaves and reaching out to us. Go to junk stores and buy used equipment. Do not buy Chinese gadgets as it enables them to massacre the Tibetans. Every time you turn your iPhone on you burn a nun in Tibet. It's ironic that this video was probably taken with and viewed on Chinese slave products but that doesn't change the evidence. I'm opening an American slave factory to assemble iPods and sew dog clothing. Who wants to apply for a job?