A heron, above. – Zaxborg

March 10, 2020

He does not look like his mother

 

He did not cry, perhaps because he heard me first. Maurice is tall and slender, maybe six feet, yet he had the intensity of someone the size of a double decker bus. At his age, he seems much younger and much more absent. He is probably twenty. His reddish hair is coarse and unruly. He wears all black. He does not look like his mother.

Fuck that chick, getting hit on by the head. She was never available and he should be excused for acting like a juvenile geezer. Now the kids are getting weird. One of them writes she “wants to scream and punch him in the face.” I don’t know if she was being sincere. Picking a fight with the Head of the Chair and not being available.

***

Years later i read accounts of remote islands and listening posts with tents, and wonder how much of this experience stayed with them. there are tapes, sometimes too loud to listen to, places with proper medical care, places with blacked-out windows and problems with maintenance, but nada. where’s the appreciation for what we do.

Isolated exiles with set airs. That’s where I’m going.

Do you know that you were there for the origin of modern day terrorism? Do you know that you were there for the creation of the internet? Do you know that you were there for the creation of all capitalistic, colonialist ideologies, which greatly harm the world today?

Today, there are not many people who know about those events. Even the government is not supposed to know about them. That’s why, some say, even a higher execution level of online criminals will never be enough to put a stop to the plague of corruption that is plaguing this world today.

There are two kinds of justice. One when your views are heard and another when they are ignored. The one isn’t really justice and the other is very little justice. But there is something worse. I haven’t done anything wrong. I’m innocent and the people who are guilty are not going to be punished.

***

His body moved. I turned to face the heron rising toward me from the ocean, the ripple pattern with which it writhed visible. Heron, me. I wrapped him up in my arms, and he flopped about in my arms. With the wind dying down, we stood there, heron atop me, staring down at the sea.

Surely this was no nightclub. Plus, they weren’t in the Strip, not at midnight, not on the Main Street.

And even then, things felt more intimate than life and death. The music took a different tone; it was hushed. Lady Veronica and Fred caught themselves looking at it, sides turned, wondering what else to look at. There. Mention of drugs. Yes.

***

Tape loops do not engender confidence. Patience does. When an inscrutable and intractable mixture of pretensions, delight, pretension, pretension, hit on a chord, step back, and consider what else you could do with it. Pastel tiled walls, with damp wood, must look lovely. Seeing the same tile applied to smooth cement and crumbling down uneven slopes, I caught myself wondering how long the formula would work on Tender,. I’m trying to figure out if the process, if it ever works at all.