Lights in the Sky

The day was hot. The heat sat down over the face of the city, queening it. The heat grows dents on cars and brings restless men to sit on porches. Old women wear shorts exposing their gray withered and veiny stumps while bums emerge from their hiding places to bask on sidewalks and park benches fully clothed. Parking lots become a test of willpower and expressions look even more dire. People walk slow, shoulders slumped, heads down exposing bad haircuts and genetic shortcomings. Confidence is cloaked misery and hawaiian shirts are blatant depravity. But this is good weather. Bum weather. With the ocean still too cold to swim in and the city too hot to tolerate only the intolerables can fully reign. Stained and crusty clothes are coronated in the deep and ardent sweat of the city’s dying last gasp as a hot and unforgiving wind slowly exhales from hell. Grey and threadbare sweatshirts team up with rancid black jeans the bum’s slowly take over. Rolling around in the dry gutters. Crawling on calloused and scaly brown bellies through empty big gulp cups and cigarette butts. Over once dead pieces of bubble gum now revived into a sticky seedy afterlife by the heat. I myself was wearing jeans, almost obscene in this heat as my swim trunks rode shotgun just inches away. But you never know when you might have to switch it back on again. There are times when I am one with the people but not today. In times like this all city creatures are predator and prey. A greasy look from a dented trashcan. Flies buzzing around a derelict car. The dog that is lying in the dusty street licking its own asshole. Its days like this when the city gorges on its own body and all men become cannibals unto themselves.

I drive around the city for a while, penetrating the clammy depths until I end up at the intersection of 30th and Upas. Somehow a strange enigma in the middle of the sprawl. It seems almost appropriate that I should end up here on a day like this. This place, a pocket of unchecked growth in between overlapping zones of control. Punctuated by the rotting stink of fast-food, gay bars, and modern american detritus. The laws of nature and the laws of man cast no shadow here. Reverberating off the pacific ocean this is the backwash of manifest destiny. A bubble of no-dominion in the heart of an oppressed land. No one culture is king, no one language holds tyranny over the tongue, no one idea is completely expressed. Everything is just another ingredient in the stew. And the twitching limbs of the junkie behind the dumpster and the slow methodical yet muted scraping of an old woman’s tennis ball covered walker legs and the clicking of high heels of a drag queen and the slow lumbering drone of impatient car horns in the background all combines to strum out a bizarre melody that chimes in discord against the cacophony of the city’s grinding gears.

This place, between the grease and the sodomy, is our urban confessional and it is here that our penance is paid. Here, where a starving man lies next to a loaf of bread and a poor man throws money at the rich. I park and sit down for a quick drink at the Jack-in-the-Box surrounded by table-tops covered with epitaphs and death threats. Mostly just the window dressing on the place to keep the tourists away. There is no government here, no constitution. Here where rusty nails grow out of dead trees. Where the tangy smell of rotting fish and the pungent funk of ethnic sweat make you want to eat and retch all at the same time and the trappings of industrial society market themselves on the machinery of a dead world. And all of it a stones throw from the neon buzz of institutional salvation.

I walk for a while, moving north up 30th street until I hit University Ave. The gateway to North Park, home to pawn shops and check cashing stores. A taco stand that gives 15% payday advance loans and every other sickly industry. Where braided haired tree huggers throw peace signs as they stop traffic in the pulsing city streets. Where the poor and uneducated people become victims of flash advertising and marketing psychology and other vast, invisible, and incomprehensible forces of nature.I ask a bum laying in some tall grass if I can take his picture and he asks for 5 bucks. Nothing is for free in this world. I offer him one and he says he’s gotta “ask his old lady first”. He pokes at an unmoving slump of pink laundry that he happen to be laying on and it groans back “I aint givin one more blowjob today”. I’m not completely sure the voice from under the pink mess was female, or even human for that matter. I snap the picture before I wait for the whole situation to become resolved and the bum takes great offense at this. He rises angrily and moves towards me to cover my body with his filthy hate but after a quick flash of my brass knuckles and he melts back down into the nasty looking pile of garbage. That’s the way it goes in the city, either you are taking something or being taken from, especially in the increasingly stifling heat.

I generally prefer knuckles over a knife on these expeditions. Everyone’s had a knife pulled on them before. The threat of a dirty penetration works well but a set of brassies in my fist, a big ugly ape like me, forget about it. I can smash the side of a car in or bash a window, fuck, I can make a man’s face look like a bowl of spaghetti in less that 30 seconds. Besides who wants to pop a street person and get their viral bacteria sewage juice all over them anyway.

30th and University. Back on the main thoroughfare. You can find everything you’re looking for on University. The strutters and the pushers, thugs and punks with colored hair. Trees grow out of the sidewalk and the street signals chirp like birds. Kids sift through ashtrays for usable butts while old dirty men walk around and erupt with deep, thick, sloppy coughs. The stuggle here is real, the human tension scrapes down your spine like fingernails cutting through Styrofoam. This place affects things in metaphysical ways. Like Shakesphere strung out on smack writing Hamlet with a dirty two inch long pencil that he sharpens with his teeth. Even though the creation is exactly the same it is changed in some way, mutated.

These bums, these tramps, these hobos and street people. They are the modern hunter gatherers. My people. Pushing their lives around in shopping carts. Immune to taxes and cellphones and twenty dollar cover charges. A throwback to an earlier time and yet adulterated by the city and modern living. Kicking dirt over puddles of blood, leaving their interstitial cave paintings to be stepped over by gnarled limbs and clawed at by gnobby undeveloped fingerless hands. These people are strangely closer to the unknown. Street prophets, visionaries, madmen. Whispering, talking, screaming, singing, arguing with invisible things that they alone have access to. Speaking in tongues, incomprehensible testaments to the horrors of their world. Wrestling with dirty old sweaters and crying into bottles wrapped in paper bags. Their history is passed on only in the continued suffering of the human race.

A black woman in a dark blue Jaguar pulls up to where I am standing.
“CRYSTAL, CRYSTAL METH!”
She looks at me, winks, smiles and cocks her head to the side.
“Gotta keep off that CRYSTAL METH!”
She drives off.

I walk past strange gatherings of people singing foreign hymns to redundant electric organ chords. Beating tambourines and holding their hands to the sky behind graffiti covered windows and Venetian blinds. The noise rising and falling as a little girl in a flower dress opens and closes the door. All at once, the smell and the sounds and the images all rise up in me. A fat woman with gray hair and fat nipples showing through her tight green t-shirt grimacing and scratching her belly violently. A shirtless black man sucking his fingertips after eating a long greasy piece of bacon. A small footless bird trying to land next to the slime puddle oozing out from under an overflowing trashcan. I realize all at once that I need to get the fuck out of this place.

My presence has started to upset the balance of the universe. I walk back to my truck and shoot straight across the bay bridge into Coronado and blast head first into the icy waves with what’s left of my fighting spirit. The extreme cold of the water cleansing me from the grime of the city but I knew it would take something more to get me back on my feet again. A good night of drinking.

6 beers

5-6 vodka redbulls

1 jello shot (yuck, thanks Mikey)

Cella bumps into 2 cars then parks on the curb

We walk 1/2 mile in wrong direction before finding the bar

50 forgettable conversations

A drunken phone call at the end of the night to my buddy Brian..

Brian and I confirm plans to trade it all in for a couple of days starting the next morning. I pass out. I wake up. Throw a bunch of camping shit into my rucksack (muscle memory from a thousand such times in the teams). Run north up the 5 until I hit san juan capistrano. Hook up with Brian and immediately launch an expedition deep into the Ortega Mountains for a couple days. We hit Ralphs up for some needed last minute supplies then strike out.

sunscreen
deet
water
dennison’s chile

Brian brought a flute and a .25 (pistol) I stuffed away my camera and a notebook. It’s too bad guitars are too cumbersome for several days on backpacking and camping out because between the heat and the flies we could have used the release.

It seems like all at once we are on the trail, Brian and I. Struggling against the heat and the light for some kind of rustic reprieve. I rip the sleeve off my t-shirt and fashion it into a headband as we stride deeper and deeper into the wilds. Stopping only for a quick drink of water and for Brian to puff a few rips off his weedpipe we make our way forward past rotting trees and water striders.

We talk about all sorts of shit while we hike evolution, astronomy, ghetto gossip. About hunter/gatherers, about the Samurai Crabs (Heike Crab) in Japan, about dogs.

In 1185, the emperor of Japan, seven year old Antoku, was involved in a long bloody battle between the Heike and the Genji. On April 24, 1185, the emperor and his forces lost to the Genji. The Heike warrior survivors threw themselves into the sea. The emperor was drowned by his grandmother to prevent the Genji from capturing him. Only forty-three women survived, and they were reduced to selling flowers to the fishermen in the area. These fishermen caught crabs and other fish for a living. As the story goes, one day the fishermen caught some crabs that appeared to have faces on their shells. The surviving women convinced the fishermen, who believed in the divinity of the dead emperor, that the faces represented reincarnated spirits of the dead Samurai warriors and/or the dead boy-emperor, Antoku. Frightened, the fishermen from that time on, threw all the crabs with faces back into the sea where the crabs continued breeding. Over the centuries, each successive generation of crabs included more and more with faces, and the faces came to look more and more like Samurai warriors’ faces. Because the people ate only the crabs without faces, the rejected Heike crabs evolved through natural selection to have faces distinctly resembling those of Samurai warriors.

Another fucked up thought is that all dog breeds evolved from the wolf. The naked Chinese dog or the Chow-Chow with the blue tongue have the same evolutionary history, and this only happened in the last 12 thousand years. The weird thing is that dogs are a completely human creation just like the Samurai crabs. So what about humans? 15 thousand years ago we were on the great hunts all over the world throwing spears at wooly mammoths, but look at people today. What is our destiny? What will happen to the human race? Do we still evolve? In what direction? Because of medicine and technology most people survive today that would not have survived even 100 years ago. So is there still natural selection? If there is no natural selection, what will happen to our genes?

We finally make it to where we would make our stand against the mountains at night. Good view, flat ground, some usable bushes as well as some rocks nearby. We dump out the rucksacks and put up a quick lean-to. The heat was pretty strong, both of us thinking we had suffered severe sunburns but actually just working through some minor heat exhaustion. It felt good to have a ruck on my back again. It felt shitty to experience bugs in the wild again. Biting flies, what an invention. Incessantly nagging and pestering, crawling and buzzing through your dried sweat encrusted hair. Relentlessly crawling into ears and eyes. This is not what I had imagined. All my vistas spoiled, all my thoughts interrupted, all my meals desecrated, my relaxation forced into tense anddesperatestruggles to escape the oppressive buzzing pests.My freedom only in the few fleeting moments when a gathering breeze disrupts the swarming horde long enough for me to take one uncongested breath of mountain air before the beasts re-aquire their lock on me. My hopes only that with the evening these creatures will melt back away into the wilderness. It seems I traded one form of parasite for another at times while I wonder what new pest will emerge with the rising darkness to stalk my patience and play games with my emotions. Oh, and just for the record,

Deet Don’t Work!

I want to Comumbine High School everyone in that fucking company. Walk in with machine guns and flame throwers and home-made bombs and make those fuckers pay dearly for the lies and the frustration. Brian soaked his head in enough deet to pollute the mississippi river and still the demons came. Wave after wave, covering my body in a heaving sultry blanket of fat black flies. As the deet burns cancer into every cut and scratch on my body and the flies circle around for one final pass, the kill shot as it were, I quietly wonder to myself if this is it. Is this it unto infinity? Failed relationships and physical torment. Uncomfortable silences and incomplete dreams. Until the darkness washes over me and I never come up for air again. Or should I be happy. Should I be content that I’m not trapped and blind in the daily struggles of rats in a maze. Maybe this freedom comes with it’s own cross to bear.

“God-damn-it” I cry

Brian and I both start laughing

Brian “Dude, that sounded like sincere outrage.”

We laugh some more. The great and terrible fact about humans is that they can get used to anything. And so we did, adapt, until each painful bite brought laughter and the daring exploits of a few brave flies into our bodily crevices (previously thought off-limits) almost gave cause for praise. I lay there and stare with deet burned eyes into the setting sun. The abysmal orange ball giving one last bow before dipping below the mountains. I wonder if I’ll miss it, when the buzzing stops. But for now we are still in the depths of our own self-pity.

Brian “Dude, one was biting me and I sprayed him with deet, like directly, and he still kept eating me.”

Me “Fucking deet!”

Brian “You know that shit, you know.. ‘for like 70 cents a day you can save these children’”.

Me “Yeah”

Brian “Well they always have flies all over them and they don’t even care”

Me “Dude, there one on your mouth!”

Brian laughing “I’m like one of those African kids with one like in my eyeball. Do you think they are getting worse?”

Me “Yes, fuck yes.”

Brian “This is supposed to be the best time of year to come out here. They said the bugs were gonna be bad though because of all the rain we’ve had this year.”

I run from under our lean-to onto a nearby rock outcropping.

Brian laughing “Dude, you’ve got deet streaks on your back!”

We both laugh harder

Brian “Like where I sprayed you with deet mixed with dirt and now you have these full-on deet streaks on your back”

Me “Dude, if you had to shit out here there would be like 500 flies on your asshole helping you pull it out. They could all be on it like ‘heave-ho’ and pulling.”

Brian “haha.. fully.”

Me “This is why that weird ass ranger bitch was laughing at us, she fucking knew, she fucking loves it. That bitch sent us out here to die!”

We both laugh some more

Me “Dude, remember those two old-timers we passed on the trail coming up here?”

Brian “Yeah, you mean those guys I gave the bad directions to?”

Me “Yeah! Haha! Those guys are probably just bones right now, lost and eaten to death by flies.”

We lie there like corpses waiting for the night almost zenlike, in a trance, motionless under the chaotic frenzy of flies. They crawled and buzzed and put their plunger-like tongues and bit every inch of my body for 5 hours. Then, as darkness settled into the valley, all at once the flies were gone. A full moon rose over the mountaintops and Brian and I emerged from our trances to dine in the lingering twilight. I munched down three packages of seasoned tuna and some water. Brian busted out the heat-tab stove and cooked up a can of Dennisons chile.

Brian “This is about a billion and a half times more tolerable.”

The place got quiet. The soft calls of birds had replaced the relentless buzzing of the flies. Crickets chirped a smooth song into the warm evening air. I climbed back up on the rock outcropping, unbuttoned my shirt and took a long slow breath. Trying with all my might to be just in that very moment for as long as I could. The first star peeked out in the western sky and I made a wish on it. I know its stupid but I guess I just wanted to do it anyway. As I looked down over the dimming valley I wondered in ten thousand years ago people looked at what they had become and longed for the freedom of the hunt once again. Brisan comes up and sits next to me as he blazes a few hits from his pipe.

Brian “This here, with the moon over there, and the mist like that… Dude, that’s the good one.”

Me “Yeah bro, that is the good one.”

Brian pointing at the star I just wished on “I think that star is saturn. It’s pretty bright this time of year.”

Me “Dude, I love looking at the stars.”

Brian “It always trips me out looking at that kind of stuff.”

Me “Yeah, me too, like it makes you feel so small and insignificant when I look at all those stars and galaxies and stuff. It also tells you, no-bullshit, that there is no fucking god or heaven or anything else like that. Like we’re just mold on a rock.”

Brian “Yeah, I feel the same way dude but it doesn’t bother me as much as it bothers you.”

Me “I just don’t ever want to die. I wish I could go explore the universe forever and see all kinds of weird and awesome shit but my stupid ape brain probably couldn’t even remember everything anyway.”

Brian “Totally”

Me “It’s like when I see a picture of two galaxies smashing into each other it just reminds me that pretty soon its gonna be nothingness forever. I always try to make my life special always try and learn whatever I can and grow and make my accomplishments unique and profound but in the end who fucking cares what mold does.”

Brian “Fully”

Eventually we get down off the rocks and climb into our sleeping bags. We stare up at the stars and point out satellites to each other between conversations. Brian tells me that he just found out about these cool things called Iridium Flares. “Iridium Flares” are flashes of light in the night sky brighter than even the brightest star. They are caused by the massive array of Iridium Communications Satellites (i.e. Iridium satphones like we had back at seal team) orbiting the planet. Each satellite has a mirror-like antenna about the size and reflectivity of a dressing mirror. They are at a set angle to planet earth and fly 485 miles up where they can reflect sunlight in the night sky. With computers and angles and lazerbeams and stuff like that people are able to figure out when and how bright a certain Iridium satellite will “flare” but they only last for a few seconds so unless you know exactly where and when to look you will probably never see one. Here are some helpful resources so that you can see your very own Iridium Flare.

Geocode.com = Get your Lat/Long by typing in your address (or just use a GPS)

HeavensAbove.com = Find the Iridium Flares in your area (using the Lat/Long you just got)

San Diego Area Iridium Flares Predictions

Los Angeles Area Iridium Flares Predictions

We flashback to a thousand other nights we spent together just boozing and talking about life and the stars and all kinds of shit. We talk about bomb shelters and 50′s music and Christopher Walkin (with several imitations) and why he talks all fucking weird. We lay out there under the stars until about 12:30 in the morning until the pauses slowly overcome the conversation and we both fall asleep.

The next day we make our way back to Ortega Hwy and cruise back down through the clouds to San Juan Capistrano. I grab a fast food egg sandwich and a cup of coffee and head back into the meat of San Diego. Back to the pimps swinging canes in front of liquor stores and drunk pregnant hookers, back to the land of strange messages and confusing signs. I pull back into my parking spot, throw my dirty clothes on the floor and look up the next Iridium Flare on the internet. In the end this is just another moral-free adventure. There are no grand metanarratives to be explained, there is no real lesson to be learned, there are no good guys or bad guys, mostly just a bunch of people doing whatever. Just a bunch of mold growing on a rock. Worm food. I don’t know what the fuck this world is all about, but I’m gonna go watch a satellite flash in the sky tonight. Later!

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