The Search for the New American Dream Part 2
I am on a quest ……
Today’s dispatch is captured in the amber waves of time and space this fine Memorial Day weekend from Mt. Hood Oregon, specifically Lake Timothy.
I still find myself whispering to the universe for answers, traveling highways, byways, roadside capitalism and all it’s sweet treats, as I continue my mad cap search, quest, hunt, perhaps even fugitive capture, of the New American Dream.
If it is real, my target, this new thing, it must be cunning to be surviving in these times where dream and hope are often cut to ribbons by a CNN headline, or a Washington Post expose of how awfully far off the cliff we have gone! This new American dream is brought to us by its own gravity, an act of uncanny sheer will, in an effort to spite the old american dream. I hear they used to date.
The old thing, the former nascent dream of whisky vapors and visions that looked like liberty, at least from afar, the old american dream just seems like a desperate ex-lover on cable news. It’s slithering form agitated and venom dipped mouth begging us all to give a fuck about two geriatric war criminals and their live wrestling match set for 2024.
No, the new American dream must be cunning, like a witch surrounded by the fires of puritan nonsense. Not any sort of nonsense. This is a most dangerous form of nonsense that Americans in particular are prone to not have much immunity against.
It’s an interdimensional illness I have been watching spread across worlds, but that’s a story for another day. A new form of consumption, but this one actually consumes the soul of the individual until a hollowed out mass of ill informed and uncited research papers take root in them.
Too much to weed out if anyone asked me, best to throw the whole fascist out and start over next generation.
The first symptom is a phantom call back to a mythic time in the near past where everyone was normal and just like you, and you and you. It all fit and made sense, and now the world doesn’t make sense, so we have to go out here to straighten out all these queer and odd and post-hetronormative variants. These antisocial and anti-American empire elements must be dealt with.
Drivel and nonsense driven by a realization that will never go away:
There is something wrong with this country, with this world, with history itself. Only grifters try to tell you there is a solution to the enigma that is the human experience.
Grifters, pastors, politicians. The occasional “organizer.”
We have abolished prisons, and brought them back. We have abolished the empire and brought it back. The human capacity is always there for magnificent renderings of a society that would make us all proud to be a part of. I think lately I have been questioning our will.
More specifically my will, or willingness, to believe in that. Us. Our collective ability to overcome the swine and the bullshit.
It is with that framework that I set out from Houston, TX along the 1-10 to take the old Route 66, eventually to continue my search for this New American Dream.
I decided to go into a knife outlet along the 66. I figured I needed a new buck knife, and this was a place where I would be supplied with a willing participant in the great new social experiment of mining america for you, the readers edification.
I have no idea when the average dude became convinced by the media that we are all suddenly qualified to legislate a continent held together by norms, and not laws, but you can bet your last two dollar bill there is a ready supply of jackasses who actually want the job of politician. They may not admit it, but left, right, progressive or constitutional conservatives, and organizers of all stripes, if you listen to them rant long enough: it isn't that they aren't outraged by the system itself, the very constructs we call society. Most of the time they are just angry they aren't in charge.
I, on the other hand,am here for the utter decay and rotting out of this system. I am the cosmic rust sprinkled on your head like brown baptism in the dirt. In all the earthen, dusty places.
May it all come crashing down on our heads.
Now I don't know when was the last time you went shopping for what is essentially a weapon in Arizona, but let me tell you when it comes to word freedom, that is one of the few things I think they truly mean. Easy access to weapons.
Don’t get me wrong: I am a Highwayman, rather a Highwayqueer, and I carry a saber and a buck knife. I mean, I spend a lot of time in the middle of nowhere. Alone. If it was legal, I would probably carry a pistol. Sorry team I am not a Black trans person convinced disarming the poor is the solution.
Weapons of war?For sure. No one needs a sub machine gun as a civilian, considering 90% of gun encounters in America are 3 feet, 3 shots, and 3 seconds, usually someone you know. There is no gun that can kill that wickedness.
But a pistol? A rifle? These basic items are how my first ancestor in this land escaped enslavement, and eventually fought for his freedom as an American Union soldier. I agree these are a fundamental part of our story now. What we do with it -and how we use these basic tools- well, that has 200+ years of roiling debate, debauchery, and now white America's children to sift through.
Claiming them as a fundamental right, or rather a human right, is a stretch for me, but I get it.
I see the perspective, being part of an endangered species myself in this land. Particularly if I was in a shrinking group that had used this combination: powder, steel, germs, to create my whole world.
According to Franklin, Jefferson, and Adams, these are still my siblings in the “promise” of this republic in this roadside knife outlet. I should be able to have an ol’ tumble in the marketplace of ideas. Besides, what's the worst that can happen talking politics in an Arizona weapon store?
I walk in and the proprietor and I lock eyes. I scan his tattoos for prison or fasc signs. There appeared to be no chud scrawl on his arms, and his obvious employee looked at me with the desperation of a man who see’s escape from one long ass tirade of a conversation. Like a “trapped” kitten in a basket, that look of desperation. Not truly trapped, and wrapped in warm blankets, but still afraid of their own surroundings.
He smiled happy to get away to “have a smoke.” He had two prison pieces, and was doing a well choreographed routine of one chatting you up, and the other watching the door outside obviously. I gave him the 1000 yard stare only a year in solitary can give you, and he just smiled. People who have been held hostage by the prison industrial complex have a subtle somatic language, and with a smile back I let him know I wasn’t here to kill his boss or make him chase me into the desert over a 200 dollar knife.
He lit up in the store walking out.
As for me, I had on my Stetson hat with rainbow colored feather, my rodeo best shirt bought for me by my partner in Houston, and some Walmart jean shorts. I stood there soaking in the smell of cortisone released as a result of white fear to black bodies. When I was a younger traveling queer bard I was repelled by it, and twisted myself in knots to make it go away. Nowadays I just stand there and drink it in. I it’s subtle notes and banquets of unfounded terror where someone’s very bones and sweat betray them to say: we know what we have done to these peoples.
I give out my standard “How you boys doing?” An intro to my own well choreographed rant, in which I give them in run on sentence after run on sentence, the several roadside attractions I have visited, how Ii'm from Philly, kind of stay in Houston, in the Bay, in Portland, sometimes go to New Mexico, but I’m really just from the road speech, in a dizzying amount of time.
He looks up at me and says “ I was just telling my buddy that Joe Rogan said on his podcast————-
*Let us pause here dear reader because I know your body just braced, but I swear this is a story of surprising hope. Joy. Wonder. A lot of awkwardness.*
—————— that we should put down our phones and just get to know people as Americans. Despite differences, politics, we should just talk.”
This is a true story. That happened when I walked in, this little weird knife shop guy, with a literal shrine to Trump in a glass case in the center of his five5 room knife shop, looks up at me and says that with wide-eyed wonder in his eyes.
Well what’s an interdimensional bard and sorcerer to do? I had conjured up this mess;I can't stand there gobsmacked. So I sat through 45 minutes of it all. From Covid-19 theories, 2nd amendment under infringement pokes and prods, to finally his real beef. Now he has LGBTQ friends, he said. I mean, he put those four letters together like he was assembling a paper plane for the first time and was as surprised as me when it came out sounding mostly right, but he was upset that media, that was me I had told him a lot about who I was at this point, was shoving it down his throat.
Now what the fuck “it” is is typically a loose and shady glitter filled web of acknowledgment that people like me exist that all add up to conspiracy. Most of these I batted away with playfulness because I want to hear what this knife-dealing, Joe Rogan following, comic book reading, obviously agitated by the state of things lil desert merchant was upset about.
Like to hear him. Not what everyone in the world tells me to think of him, this place, this situation as we hand 12-20 inch knives casually back and forth, or a switch blade, and comfortably move them in positions mostly meant to either filet a fish or swiftly flip the other handle down, edge out, blunt side along your arm to brace to cut a person's throat, 5 feet from what he now claimed was his mom’s Trump shrine that took up a floor to roof glass case in the very center of the store. I will spare you his entire manifesto, but there are two really obvious lessons from what he came to as “conclusions.”
This guy had all the same concerns as my progressive friends, he was just in the media world that promoted a different reaction. Capitalism was slinging us both around like a monkey playing with its own shit.
Liberals get thrown against the glass, they scream: disarm. This guy gets thrown against the glass, he screams: load up. But isn't it comforting to know we are just shit sliding down glass? I mean we are just brown slimy skid marks across the continent.
The last lesson? There is always a “bi-sexual friend” who makes them question their wees wees. Or makes their wee wee’s feel strange, like in gym class.
And yes, this guy trotted out as evidence his high school buddy who hit on him, and I think he was into letting him go down on him. I am unsure. I started thinking about high school dudes I would rail, but apparently his moment with the same 30 second fantasies had led to months of this. Him berating customers until they feel so uncomfortable they they …….
Then it hit me: That's his scam. Making weirdos on their way to LA feel so uncomfortable they grab a knife in the first two rooms where the prices are 299 and up. But if you can stomach him for 20-30 minutes you get a reasonably priced knife. Like I got a super sweet old timer buck knife and got to tell him at the end in no uncertain terms he had accomplished his goal.
That I was the anti-fascist trans faggot Black liberation movement member of the media his mama had for sure warned him about. That he did put his phone down. He did talk across the cultural, socioeconomic and political gulf that is our country on charts in TVstudios.
I mean, it kinda helps that I look like I might be in a fight that isn't worth the hassle in these situations, or that I have no regard for my own life. I am on a quest from the Divine after all. Inherent in that is risk to life, limb, heart or mind. Loss of self even. Here was the New American Dream opening doors in knife shops in Arizona. Using Joe fucking Rogan. Route 66 you never fail me.
We might make it yet folks.
I drove away happy with my new knife purchase for my camper van lifestyle, and he walked away smiling, literally running out to tell his buddy it worked. I can imagine the conversation as I kicked up dust and left.
“Dude talking really worked.”