I have no motorcycle.  It is in the shop til Friday. (twas tipped in parking lot. again.)

I hate my life; it is not worth living.

fresh young faces, invigorated conversation, and "where are the hedge shears"

sigh.

I hope they all work out, for my own sake. I don't want to go around breaking knees at the same rate I had to last year. And I hope they all work out for their own sake because no one ever realizes how much easier life is made by consistency and responsibility on the job...esp. when one does not have a lot of time to play with.

Well I’ve drunk to drown, on every ocean I’ve been 
Lake Tanganyika, where the crocodiles swim 
Halifax, Nova Scotia to Van Diemen’s land 
Well I drank with the Sultan, down the Suez Canal

Cause Every Dog Has Its Day 
Like every woman, she gets her own way 
And if there’s a ship that sails tonight 
I’ll captain that too, just to be there with you

- Flogging Molly

The road is a deceptive beast, it is.

I thought of the imagination-trips I made when I was a little kid, riding my gray stallion through the hills of Apache country.   I was heavily armed with a Winchester rifle and two Colt .45's, (appropriately shaped birch branches) herding cattle through the gullies to Yuma through the most dangerous country in the West. Now, packaged in a cheap Korean car listening to Latin trance to keep myself awake, I was on the blazing white rails of Highway 10, completely unarmed, just trying to get through without notice.

The slash canyons and tumbleweed rises of Geronimo's country unrolled itself to the foot of the mountains, dusky far from either side of the high freeway.  The trailers and dusty cars of Geronimo's people lay scattered amongst the hills where once brush huts and twists of smoke used to arise.  It was a sad sight, it was...the sagging Oldsmobile creeping along the road, loaded down with humanity and mattresses.  The clotheslines run from the rotting trailer roof to the scrub oak, framing a huge graffiti tag on the wall of the decrepit dwelling.  The stoic glare on the weatherbeaten face of the young man leaning against the streetsign, backpack in hand.  They know what they had and what they lost and how it was taken from them, oh they remember.  And I, the white man, leaned on the accelerator to escape the accusing stares of the broken storefronts and gaping windows.  Sounds like a war zone, you say.  Isn't it a war zone, I say.  They will never forgive us, and we have forgotten them.  We give them their casino permits and welfare, but they are irrelevant to us.  We have their land; if they don't want to partake of our culture, well that's their own foolishness, eh?

The Abbot's voice was low, but the stone of the abbey chapel resonated and trembled beneath its weight.  The deep tones were taken up by rows of grey-clad monks, chanting, chanting in unison, the growl of a million spiritual horsepower sending a stream of prayer to heaven like a river, crumbling barriers impenetrable to ordinary folk. The sheer brute force of charity present in this prayer is tangible, you can practically smell it and taste it....A daily routine for them, yet never routine.  

Say the rosary at home, that's one thing; listen to an old man who has spent his life in prayer say it, and it's another thing entirely.

"You need to make it back safely, because we need you" the man in the wheelchair said.  "God bless you, have a safe trip."

"God bless you."  I hung up the phone.  Perhaps it is good to be needed by a man in a wheelchair and a tall woman in a large straw hat.  It is definitely painful to stand on the edge of their patio outside their mansion and contemplate the wispy, brown trees and scorched abtiniya, the dusty sand where lawn should be, the generally burnt patch of land with the very beautiful house in the middle of it.  Sad, it is.  So I have been successfully guilted into this, and it sort of happened without my knowledge, the hypodermic needle slipped into the clothing.

Dammit, I need a truck and a rake and a shovel and glue and PVC, and fittings.  Especially a truck.  With a truck, I can do things.  Without a truck, I am useless.  Worse than useless in fact since I am reliant then on the mobility of the client to do their job, which is wrong, just wrong.  

But I don't have time to think about trucks and shovels and money because I'm going on vacation, I'm trying to finish 3, 4 or 5 tv shows and rebuild a motorcycle and do my job and my boss's job both at once so my dear landscaping does not wilt beyond repair.  I am an insane man living an insane life, so I ought to be happy.  I'm pretty sure that if I ever get randomly shot walking out of my apartment my last thought won't be about how I ended up here but about how I forgot to empty my digital camera yesterday again.

Also, on an unrelated note, I have to resign myself to the fact that I'm a racist. I do not, and never will, understand extroverted cultures, like the one I'm in the middle of.  They irritate me.  They have no abstract sense of responsibility or morality, substituting for this a sort of tribal familial code.  I don't understand family. I don't understand a mentality based on the sufficiency of the family unit as opposed to the sufficiency of the individual.  I was raised to kill my own snakes and take personal responsibility for the ones that got away.  I was not raised to help kill our snake and then look about in vague confusion after it escapes our hands.  If I don't have enough to eat, then that's a problem that I do something about, not a problem the government does something about.

I can deal with extroverted individuals, on a case by case basis.  They're individuals.  They're people.  But I can't deal with extroversion in the abstract.  Too friggin' much drama.  I get angry just thinking about it.

So this place hates me, and I hate it.  I guess that makes us about even.

Of course, I can't stand individualistic people either, but at least they leave me the hell alone.

Don't look at me!  It's your fault for being stupid enough not to plan your exits.  Now you have to wait till this cavalcade passes, well sucks to be you.  Take your rightful place at the back of the line, missy.

The BMW slices deftly between the fluttering California flags on the back of Bunny's burgundy Harley Road King and the glaring triangles of my headlights.  Idiot.  Asshole.  Etc. 

It's elementary.  When you're dealing with a squadron of seventeen cruisers, it's common courtesy NOT to break up the group to make a stupid lane change.  All right, so you really were blond and lost, eh?  Make the next exit and go around the block!

Idiot.

Dust rose from the trail.  Five specks in a staggered formation crawled along the sinuous wash track along the foot of the mountain.  The first speck was a white horse bearing a well dressed man, saddlebags and tack black and newly polished.  The second horse, black and bearing a woman equally well dressed in new jeans and a white stetson.  Third horse, whinnying and coughing in the dust, an older woman in well worn shirt, sleeves torn at the shoulders, leather chaps.  The town of Fillmore lay ahead far ahead, a tiny cluster in the distance, a sawn-board cluster of storefronts. Steam rose from the cluster, billowing above the railroad tracks.  The horses pranced from side to side in their walk, impatient to be home to their oats and silent stables.  The sun beat down, dust coating the noses and throats of the riders.  It was hot.

The foremost rider motioned high to the right, and a gigantic crane became visible behind a shoulder of mountain.  It read Fillmore Pipeline.  The man was the manager of this pipeline company, the horsewoman pulling up next to him was his daughter.  The light turned green and the horses plodded on, one step after the next, their impatience subsided into lethargy.  The lead horse whinnied, rattling the adjacent rock wall.  The California Highway Patrol flew by, quietly, like a hawk on the pavement, a vigilant hawk checking speeds and tags and pickup loads I glanced back then ahead, the wisp of dust covering the riders had been swept into the patrol car's wake.  Fringe rattled in the 55mph breeze alongside Daughter's white Dynaglide,  pottering along its wheeltrack, her thin torso erect and proud as she grasped its handlebars.  The lead horse had become a low swept assembly of black fleetside bags and glistening chrome, the rider clad in leather vest, half helmet and goggles; my own reins were a twist grip, my knees clamping some very shiny blue metal.  We were a fleet rolling along the hot melted asphalt, headed toward a shimmering mirage.  The cowboys.  The last cowboys.  They say there is gold up in these hills.... an eager young man looks about for a response from the weatherbeaten faces around him.  They get a faraway glint in their eyes before breaking into conversation about veins found i the cuts made for the 5 freeway...about some ancient closed gold mines, still producing when their corporations and owners passed away....National Landmarks, fenced from the public with tommy guns and razor wire....

The last cowboys.  Maybe not chasing bounties or herding cattle, but alone against the elements: hot dust and hot sun, dehydration and slippery pavement.  Alone against the enemy, the hypnotic truck driver, the laser beams of the CHP.  Alone against the world that cannot know their freedom, with only each other for recourse against mishap.  Chrome glitters in the sun, open pipes rumble the ground, leather fringe flutters by.  The weary riders shift in their seats and breathe the dust, peering ahead through the flow of traffic....