Hey, it's a big WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) holiday, a holy day to illegal immigrant white Americans honoring one fall dinner where a bunch of white Pilgrims lured a bunch of friendly Native Americans into an opening--offering them badly cooked versions of their own native foods and friendly outstretched hands as the bait--remember, these Pilgrims were from England--boiled innards eaters in those days--the worst cooks in the world--so can you imagine a Native American dinner cooked by a bunch of illegal immigrant Brits? So the Pilgrims lured these Native Americans in for what you might call a "Last Supper" before they then systematically tried to annihilate them. But anyway, Growlerites are holiday takers--we don't give a damn the reason for the holiday--we see them as days when the bullshit shuts down for, in this case, 4 straight days--a few days to shovel the excess bullshit leftover from the previous year into the honeywagons so we can start off the end of this yet another year gone by with our noses somewhat up out of the excessive bullshit--it's a day when nobody has to worry about the IRS kicking in your door or the Repo man hauling off your wheels in the dead middle of the night or George W. Bush starting World War III--nope, he'll be eatin' high on the hog this holiday--all paid for by US, We the People of the US.
So there's no one here to ladle the gravy over the raw The Daily Growler--they're all spread out all over the US of A--so we hit the auto pilot button and bring you an old post from April 2006, the first month of The Daily Growler's existence--a post that got a lot of raves for the writer that wrote it--his Growler handle we've forgotten--how quickly the characters in this daily posted fictional reality can be forgotten or take on other identities--AMAZIN'.
Here's your Growler rerun--enjoy--and watch out for those turkeys from Commie China--they're deadly!
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
From Dust to Dust
TEXASThe first thing I think of when I think of Texas is earth. Is that really the first thing I should think of when I think of Texas? Maybe I should have said dirt instead of earth. Or maybe I should say dust instead of dirt. The most important book in Texas has a character in it who says that man simply exists from dust to dust. That's a horrible statement to me, especially if I reminisce on it for any stretch of time.
Like how once upon a time I stood in the middle of a certain part of Texas, the part of the state that faces square into the face of the sun during the day and is absorbed into the face of the moon at night, in a certain early season on into summer's flames.
And I've been standing there facing into that sun's sparkling heatwaves and I have been standing there just watching...daydreaming...inwardly thinking, when all of a sudden I was cold. Yes. Cold. In the middle of a certain part of Texas, standing there in the direct stare of the sun and feeling cold.
Then the extremely dry air that was frozen in stillness by the essence of its own heat around me started moving. Slightly at first, little wisps whipping at me with cold small licks. Then those licks turned to bitings. I know it immediately. I know what those bitings mean. Those bitings that precede it...and then I look up and there IT is.
First, I see a low bluish line on the flat horizon, the shimmering of the remaining dangling glass slivers of the full-faced sun's heat still boldly dancing in gestures of defiance at what is coming.
The wind is now just flat-dab cold. And now the wind throws grains of what's coming in my face and I breathe in and taste the first of what's coming in my face and what's coming in my face tastes like earth, or should I say dirt? or should I say dust?
I turn and face that rising bluish line and look it directly in its billions of eyes. I watch it rising and becoming a dark deep blue hulk raising up before me, coming at me as if coming straight up out of that earth just in front of me a few miles, though in actuality it really had started a hundred miles out to the west, out on the flattest of the flattest prairie plains, crunchy with hot sands and scraggly with low brush, suddenly spanked by a swooping down of a huge hand of wind.
Then my eyes widened as this dark blue bald hulk with the billion eyes hooded up, rising up like a thunderheaded cobra slowly straight up before me, its hood flaring wide, its body arched, its purpose to strike right at me, to come at me, to overwhelm me, to bite me.
Up, up, up, building up, rising darker and more blue, licking out with now stiff tongues of hard dirty bites, gradually coming up, its hood flaring wider and coming higher, now roiling and rolling up. As it rolls toward me, as it dances toward me, it turns from blue to red as it flares up square into the staring face of the sun.
And THEN! just like that, the face of the sun was gone. Blotted out.
There is a pain I suffer as I stand there in the middle of that certain part of Texas, in that certain early season on into summer's flames, in the middle of what once faced into the shimmering heat caused by that sun that had disappeared into those acres and acres of dust scooped up and set aroll a hundred miles west in front of me by a swooping down huge hand of wind. The pain is in the dry bath given me by those rolling, boiling rifled grains of that borne aloft sandy desert loam hurting as they shower me.
We exist from dust to dust. How many of those who had already turned to dust, from the ancient days until a recent time, had overwhelmed me that day in the middle of that particular part of Texas, in that part of Texas that faces into the face of the sun during the day...until another huge hand of wind swoops down to stir the earth a hundred miles west of where I stood there once upon a time. Had I breathed back within me the remains of my ancestors?...or other ancestors, like the ancient Clovis people, the ancient Aztecs, or the other nomadic tribes of Native Americans who once roamed these flatter than flat prairies once lush with grass and bison, with people living on the sandstone mesas, along the rivers and the creeks, following the herds of bison, across those now barren prairies to make their beds for another night under that high, high sky in the middle of that certain part of Texas, that part of Texas that faces straight into the face of the sun during the day and is absorbed by the face of that beautiful silver crying moon during the night and to wake up the next morning to face the rising sun, to cook their buffalo meat over buffalo chip coals, to eat their prairie wheat breads and mushes, then while the women struck the camp, the men sharpened their flint arrowheads as they prepared to head out across those lush grasslands to go after another buffalo, to go after another day in the face of that sun in that time when there were no dust storms. Not in that particular part of Texas, not in those certain oh-so primitive days when man did not attempt to conquer the earth but rather to go along with its moods, living within the will of this planet that spins away day by day, swirling its face dead into the face the sun during its many days and being absorbed into the silver face of the silvery moon during its many nights.
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Have a Happy Thanksgiving, White Man! Why Not Come Up and Gamble With Us at the Mohegan Sun! Welcome, Holiday Loving, White Man. Bring Plenty Wampum.
theleftoversstaff
for The Daily Growler
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