Talk O’ Town: Joshua Tree, June 2008

By Tom Loret

This morning I went into the local health food store to pick up a few items of necessity. Standing next to me was a very buffed-out six foot two inch hulk all sunburned, tanned and charred, grinning with a happy two day stubble, golden hairs glistening off his ruddy arms, long blond hair, wearing outback shorts, a roughed up T-shirt and a big ole straw woven hat. He was the picture of everything healthy, wholesome, and alternative. It seemed natural to ask, “You into solar energy?”

 “Excuse me.”

 “You into solar energy?”

 “Ah, yeah, I suppose so, it’s a good thing. Why?”

 “I just heard of Bush’s moratorium on all solar energy installations on federal BLM lands. In the same bill he removed restrictions on oil and mining. I thought you might have a stake in the matter.”

 He said, “No. Didn’t hear about that. Not really.” He chuckled, “Why would anyone want to put solar energy plants out on the desert?”

 “Yeah, crazy,” I said. “I’m just trying to figure out who in the hell voted for this crap. Did you? I know I didn’t.”

 Nature boy finished up at the register and headed for the door. On the way out he said, “Things are getting better. Way better. Just got to keep looking up.” The door closed behind him.

“For who?” I asked out loud. No polar ice expected this winter in the Arctic Sea. You mean better for the Inuit, for the polar bears, the salmon, whales, tundra, you mean better like that?”

A woman voiced-up as she brought her goods to the counter. She also wore a straw hat. It was crumpled, sweat stained and dog-eared. She was bigger than me and had a large blue tattoo stain on her right shoulder. In ninety degree weather she wore a new pair of those upscale New England mail order lamb’s wool-lined brushed skin half-calf boots and sported a satin-like brown nightie with embroidered black lace detail.

 “Everything is beautiful if you want it to be,” she said. “If you want to look at negativity, if you want to feed the negativity and spread the disease of your own negativity then you just go right ahead. Not me. We each make our own worlds and see what we want to see and my world is getting better all the time. It’s all up to you,” she reiterated. “It’s your choice.”

 “Yes, of course. I understand. We all love each other and there’s peace everywhere.”

 “That’s it. That’s it exactly. When you figure that out you won’t have to worry about things you can’t change. We’re each responsible for the way we see the world and if you want to focus on the negative then the world will be a negative place.”

 “Wow,” I thought. “Here’s my lesson in some honest to goodness new age alchemy and civic responsibility. It’s the law of opposites attract. Because I stood up against war, for the rights of women and for the welfare of children and because I voted against environmental degradation I have empowered the evil doers and am therefore responsible for all the damages and heartache done.

“Not bad,” I thought, “not bad at all. She’s the radiant source of light and doesn’t have to do anything but look pretty and think positive. It is a spiritual, kabalistic matter only devotees like her can understand. After all, everything has gotten better for her. In her universe of spiritual justice and cosmic unity everybody gets what they deserve. She gets organic tofu, range-free chicken, a tax reduction and that brand new Toyota 4Runner I saw her drive up in because she has beautiful thoughts. Good thing I studied anthropology so I could recognize this for what it is—a stage of cognitive development common in the village life of Poland or Mongolia at about 1250 AD or even BC.

“Whereas in the world I live in, the world with the anguish and tears of fellow human beings, the ones paying the consequences of her beautiful thoughts, the ones dying on the oil fields needed to fill her Toyota 4Runner, that is to say, the world with newspapers and other living things in it, well, we deserve the atrocities of extinction because we’re so negative, because we voted to stop it.”

On my way out I said, “It’s been a real bumper sticker morning for Ignorance is Bliss, eh?”

The girl, a Canadian transplant replied, “Aye.”

A MIXED BAG

by Tom Loret

There is a crisis in our midst, many crises yet rains still fall in spring. Ryan clutched his bag of groceries and unlocked the passenger side of his truck. He liked the aroma of fresh baked bread that fills the air after a downpour, the gift of wild seeds spread by the wind and cracked open by the moist heat of day. “Ah, the manna of life,” he thought, “a feast to feed spring’s fever.”  He breathed it in deep and again but stopped and looked up when he heard the horn beep. It was Steve, editor of the desert’s Sun Runner.

He shouted, “Don’t forget that story by the end of June. C’mon Ryan, give us some of that ole thunder...we need a few of us mad.”

 Ryan shook his head in ascent and muttered, “A few of us mad? This whole place is nuts and everybody in it is too damn nuts to do anything about it but get more nuts for trying.” He put his groceries down on the floor, closed the door, walked around the front, unlocked his side and sat down behind the wheel.

 “A story? You mean one with words in it—that kind of story?”

 He thought, “What time is it, bedtime? Everybody’s already asleep. Something for the afternoon to calm us all down? Nobody gets mad anymore. Half the nation is tranquilized and who knows what the other half are on. Look what happened back in 2003 when Kerr-McGee was found dumping their stale Perchlorate laden rocket fuel into our water supply and nobody says anything except national security. We don’t hear from the hundreds of thousands of families afflicted with birth defects, deformities and disabilities that occurred after pregnant mothers dined on vegetables irrigated with Kerr-McGee’s Perchlorate and then nursed their infants on its thyroid and brain killing toxins. Shall we talk about ConEd’s current plan to irradiate the desert’s population with their profitable new proposal to erect high tension wires of death? Who will care or bother to sue especially after we’re all dead or dying from cancers, gone mad with inexplicable neurological disorders and left to rot through medical inattention?

“No. Something without anger, rancor, blame, aspersion, or complaint of any kind. Something well-adjusted, a little something to further my career, appropriate for retirees and young families with children to consider. No mention of things lost, thrown away, destroyed, ignored or of the political nullity, social apathy, religious insanity and sadistic visions of state-ordered torture that we, as a nation of torturers,  must now wake up to every morning.”

He examined the moment and said, “Where does a man turn for sanity, for any clarity at all?”

He chuckled to himself when he considered that for ten percent of what we have thrown away on horror, lies and death, we could have made the whole world our friend and abolished war forever. “How? Maybe that’ll be the story. How America came together and realized the sort of paradigm shift that finds value in providing every American a job retrofitting infrastructure, cleaning up and replanting our wastelands, upgrading the energy grid, giving every kid a free college or trade education. Imagine supporting the arts rather than the nightmares of war. Imagine what the world would have looked like if, instead of war, we had loaded every boat, train, plane, ship, and truck with food, tools, medicine, books, fuels, machinery, communication equipment, and cash that was distributed wherever the needs were greatest. Peace is cheaper than war. Everybody wins including Mother Earth herself.

“Instead, we gave it all away in exchange for slogans, flag-pins, beads and the promise of a little salvation somewhere else. This barbarism demands blindness, ignorance of self and the world. It requires a docile, gullible population run much like addicts or chickens in an industrialized poultry plant. To ask where conviction, acts of will and the determination of a free and enlightened citizenry have gone is like asking where thirty-three and a third vinyl records went. Or whatever happened to farm fresh milk free of added hormones, pesticides, antibiotics, fungicides, chemical preservatives and the odd combination of industrial waste runoff? Shall it ask what kind of people willingly allow their leaders to sell them into such insurmountable debt that not even their grandchildren will know a debt-free breath of air—without a whimper, without ever asking to whose benefit?”

He shook his head when he came up blank, “A story? How about love and spiritual awakening, something indigenous to the desert. I’ll even bring a volume of Walt Whitman to recite aloud so I can hear him sing the joys of American life all so unencumbered, unindustrial and unpolluted. He’s not here to smell the smog from LA, Riverside or San Bernardino. He’s not here to drink the chemical sludge we’ve come to know as water. He’s not here to echo the wails of the latest stand of Joshua Trees just bulldozed for a parking lot. Come on Walt, don’t abandon me to what I see, to what I hear, to what I know to be the disaster it is. Teach me to love it all. Teach me to face this end of things, this disregard for life and the threatened end of all existence not like a coward who simply watches his dreams of a better world fall dead and defeated like his only child butchered before his eyes by the thoughtless hand of his own countrymen. Let me hear your American song of liberation here, now in these Joshua Trees’ uprooted screams as their prehistoric species are raked aside—garbage in what’s become of our magnanimous way of life.”

Ryan tried to snap out of it, “Hey! Settle on the love story. Make it a campy tale about what happens when Postmodern apathy puts on lipstick and meets the beast of patriarchy. That’s sure to grab the eye and engage the reader’s lurid interest. It’ll be a romance filled with sadistic schemes of murder, torture, sexual deviance and acts of the most vicious greed imaginable. It will be how together they screwed the world’s light into an endless and deafening scowl, scathing, screaming, howling, an infernal and eternal dark night in which all the world’s people not only lost their hearts and minds, but depleted their oxygen, went to sleep and never woke up again. It will be about The Rapture and all the New Age Delusions that we’ve come to suffer—except nobody will be alive to tell it.”

Ryan turned on the ignition, backed up and pulled forward onto the highway.

“Maybe it’ll rain again, soon,” he said.

Who is the Future?

Who is the future to whom I write?

Whose eyes will glance upon these words

The way mine searched for meaning

Among the entrails of a gutted life

All torn away and stomped asunder?

The heathens did come to bury whatever good we stored.

The barbarians did come to drown our song of love, of freedom,

And our pursuits of happiness—

Drowned by their cacophonous deluge that praised their god and master

Of war, impoverishment, exploitation, and enforced ignorance.

Ah, what a breed we have become—

And whose eyes will there be to read these lines

When these demons have claimed even the future as theirs,

Something they own, something they possess

And sell for the cost of one’s soul.

Give up your creative will! They demand.

Give up your awareness of self as all,

As one, as many.

Give up your vision

For as far as the eye can see,

For as deep as the heart can feel,

For as wise and playful as joy can be—

All this drowned for nothing but rage, fear and the stupidity of belief.

Whose eye will there be to read a citizen’s quiet revolt,

A protest against this sleep of death that grips

My over-medicated, undernourished nation—a slight, though

Existential protest against what makes us pitiless, without remorse and lifeless.

Give them their drugs of choice, their beliefs,

Their soaps and TV News.

Give them their ninety-nine cent discount stores

And magazines with ads for shiny new crap

And into the darkness of night they march—

Belching their chorus of doom, vomiting their smug delusions in unison.

How shameless, how absurd, how tragic.

To the eyes of tomorrow please know that I tried,

Did my best and wept myself dry.

I am sorry for leaving you no peace, for lynching tranquility,

And for the horror, sorrow and suffering we left you.

If you are there at all please

Know that a few of us did see the light,

Did act and did not go gently.

And, may it serve you to know

That we asked to become the monsters we are

When we chose to barter our freedom for chains.

Writer, poet and artist Tom Loret lives in Yucca Valley, CA, and often shares his work with desert literary fans on stage at various cultural events and open mics.

Copyright ©1995-2009 The Sun Runner, The Magazine of California Desert Life & Culture
61855 29 Palms Hwy., Joshua Tree, CA 92252, USA
Webmaster: Steve Brown