Fictions – Daniel Sidereal

June 25, 2021

DUALITY

 

You can know desire, or you can know the end of desire. Not both. The little green men with overgrown chia pet hair, floating in and out of the closed window seem to be trying to say. 

What does this mean. It simply means this planet is about as heavy as it’s going to get. And it will get heavier. And it gets worse. And it gets better. Depending on who you ask. Depending on who one is. And isn’t. See? The little green men with overgrown chia pet hair, floating in and out of the closed window didn’t need me or you to speak them into existence. If you don’t believe in the unseen keeping an upper hand on things, you clearly haven’t been slapped silly by your own tongue. Just wait. A new world is coming to you. 

The trees don’t need us to exist. For how many billions of years before human beings graced this planet were there trees. Because there’s a word for it doesn’t mean human beings have to be here. Earth was & will be a fine place without human beings. Because there’s a word for it doesn’t make it so. Or does it. Always. Sometimes. Never. Our presence as a species on this planet didn’t create trees. We created the word and expect the thing to be what it’s called. Names. Nothing more. Nothing less. When it is. When it isn’t. Chair. Bookshelf. Dining room table. Cabinet. Hard wood flooring.

My face before I was born was like a distant cosmos. In a sunflower. In the palm of your ears before you could hear the ocean. I was a body of water before I was a name in god’s mouth. Eating pussy or smoking joints with the whores behind the corner store. I call them whores because that’s the most precise term for their particular line of work. Not to their face though. I’m only calling them whores here to you in order to keep their names out of your mouth. Rose. Cali. Sugar. Love. You can know desire, or you can know the end of desire. Not both. 

If a man on the street ever asks if you are a cop, there is no reason to be frantic or even alarmed. As long as the answer is a fast and easy “no.” He is more than likely about to tell you some real shit. This is your Zen for the day. 

Some people when they write or read or think or talk, they hear a distinct voice speaking to them. Some people do not. If you’ve ever heard more than one voice speaking to you from inside your skull, chances are, whatever culture you were born into isn’t going to know what to do with that. You will need to be the shaman of your own circle. The medicine woman in your own circumference. 

It is crazy how the ones who need healing the most seem to be the most adverse to initiating that healing. That indeed is craziness. Madness. Hearing more than one voice in your head is not madness.  It’s simply circumstance. 

Madness is looking at an advertisement for a sports car driven by a rich & powerful man on the side of the bus and identifying more with the rich & powerful man driving the sports car in the advertisement than with the homeless man sitting on the same corner with you at the bus stop. Carrying that madness to the grocery store, asking nobody about where the pineapple comes from in December. How did the potatoes get here? Who’s paying off who for the bananas? Don’t even start about what’s being put in the meat….

 

 

THE DOT IN THE DISTANCE

 

The pale shadow of a man scraping in the heat of the high desert floor with hunger & thirst as his only weapons against the nuclear sky. The sky is bleak and flashing intermittently brilliant yellow and white lights from the flames behind the bombs. The gasses in the air omitted from bombs which have been falling from and exploding in the middle of the sky make it hard to breathe. He holds his breath in intervals, trying to give a moment of peace to the circulatory system. This doesn’t help, and only forces him to inhale even more of the unknown gasses when he is left gasping for air, his breath slipping through some nefarious invisible hands, refusing to be held, trying to breathe normally again. 

It is February. Or maybe it is September. He has been telling himself all he needs to do is get to the dot in the distance. The dot in the distance. The dot in the distance becomes his reason for continuing. Maybe there’s water. Maybe there’s running water. He feels like running. But he can’t. The lungs feel as if a Venus fly trap tried to close itself upon a pufferfish. Was he chewing gravel? Or was that the gasses again? The lungs feel like a porcupine was using them as a pool-side recliner. He focuses attention on the dot in the distance. Purely out of habit, a habit of his past life; the pale shadow of a man looks at his wrist. 

The cheap digital watch is flashing the time that he woke up yesterday in glitching and flinching pale green numbers. Or maybe it was today. There’s a certain rhythm to it if he stares at it long enough. There’s a certain rhythm to all of it, he thinks. No time for sentimentality now though, he thinks again. The pale shadow of a man smiles. 

The time is uncertain, though by the interval of silence between the last raining of those wretched atmospheric explosions from the sky and now, he knew the next explosion was not far off. Whether they are bombs or a planet’s natural defense against a formidable foe is not important, he thinks. These hallucinatory bombs falling from the sky, discharging poisonous gasses and the empty desert and nuclear sky engulfing him were all a part of his planet’s keeping the balance. The pale shadow finally reaches what he was convinced was a hallucination from the gasses. The dot in the distance. A cool shack with a fan running, clinking remnants of cool air towards the front door. The pale shadow opens the door. On the table in front of the fan and the one window in the tiny shack: a 4 1/2 ft. tall saguaro cactus shaped like a giant dildo, or a miniature rocket ship. The pale shadow exhales. Welcome home. Get me the fuck outta here.