The Copulation of Highway Construction

Isn't it strange how ideas in a book, as you read, glide along the already well-traveled thought-roads in your mind, grooved deeply by millions of duplicate thoughts, racing rote, merging like clever obligatory notes to your subconscious: "This is original!" "Whoa!" "This is different!" Occasionally I am shocked to discover that my thoughts are not my own. After writing "...the tropical hurricane that is AJ", I went back to a favorite blog and "discovered" the phrase, "...Tropical Storm Emerson". Suddenly illusions of originality began to crumble in my mind. Here come the bulldozers. Highway under Construction. Fuck me.

A couple of dark nights ago, asleep at the wheel, I awoke to find myself in an old farmhouse, the very same one where I spent a snowy winter with torches and silver (another story) in a distant past. Researching T.C. Boyle this morning, I find his uncanny resemblance to Jesus (including the savior's long-haired sexiness combined with otherworldly compassion and the ability to see into my very soul!) remarkably similar to the lover who joined me there. Big old gray midwestern farmhouse in need of paint, with many small drab wallpapered rooms upstairs, all draughty and cold, but the kitchen was warm, and that is where we found life. Bacon crackled on the cookstove and pancakes on the griddle multiplied and suddenly strangers at the door asked for food. Flower children. "I think we have only apples," I said generously but suspiciously. Tentatively. At once, like a dazzling powerpoint presention, a bowl of Delicious apples (Shiny! Red!) popped into the foreground of this dreamscape, funky silkscreen abstract still life, buffed to perfection like a subliminal affirmation of heaven. Seeing a good thing, the hippies, drug addicts, aggressive demanders of generosity, marched right in, jostled me(!), cold eyes darting into the kitchen where my lover cooked delicious aromatic food that I had just denied that we had. Children played innocently on the floor. The vibe darkened. Distrust became discomfort.

Discomfort quickly found the fast-road to fear. These psychopathic drug users wearing peace love personas multiplied and fanned out, the front yard was full of them. Inside they sat in old stuffed chairs, their bare feet claiming the cold hardwood floor, their eyes full of greedy entitlement. The house was suddenly lit with bodies, long electric hair moving with a warm glow from livingroom to diningroom and soft skin the color of flesh-brushing-against-flesh filling all the wintry remote bedrooms. Dismissing me as unimportant. Me! Me!

My mind, now racing, also dismisses myself as irrelevant. Bullshit motherfucker cocksucker assholes! I can't trust my thoughts. Panicking, I see two frolicking love children chase one another into oncoming traffic at the bottom of the lawn and narrowly avoid being crushed like blissed-out insects.

Desperately seeking solace, I remember that Buddhists might say my thoughts aren't my thoughts anyway. They are simply thoughts, out there, like a movie reel that never stops passing through our mind. We desire to claim them as our own, dwell on them, publish them, analyze them, victimize ourselves with them, roll in bed with them, fuck ourselves over. and over. and over, with them. What we really need to do is see thoughts for what they are. Illusions. Distractions. The same old mind grooves.

Why shouldn't we clear new roads through the wilderness? All that unused territory, with no thought life whatsoever, it probably holds natural wonders, useful resources that would soothe the mind and prove (at last!) we are the cleverest of geniuses. As new construction gets underway, unearthed is what may be the remnants of my self. Stop digging! I resist slyly pocketing the find and calling it an artifact, selling it on the black market. This is no undeveloped wilderness. This is empty. This is home.