ether notes.

                 … it is a land that stretches ceaselessly and goes nowhere, a land where each has his own acre, they can walk for centuries without stepping out of it, for its citizens take pride in their land, they show you their home… I was born here, you see, my grandfather was born in that shed right over there, I broke my arm there… the concept of hiding is unknown… everything is seen, the seen sees back with a merciless and mind-dismantling intensity and we are thirty over the speed limit… someone yawns… someone scans for a station…

                                               … and I resign as anything near a writer if asked to describe the desolation of flatness, the despair of mars-like snow-covered craters and canyons as the twilight drops and the wind whips and flirts with your machine and there is not a tree for lifetimes and awe is not a word but an eighth sense growing like an ear out of your shoulderblades in an amazement and downright mortal fear… if asked to describe the manic joy of sunlight, the chimneyed clouds out of the tips of the Rockies, the clarity of the carless road in the morning and the soporific death it flops over the windshield at night…this land - you are obese in your loneliness, a leafless amnesiac and I bless and kiss your open womb of not knowing…

                                                                                          …and I have nothing, nothing to bring home, an ink stained backseat, a candy I have chewed to keep awake, an upset stomach, I have Paco, the Kum&Go clerk for the night (yes, it is, and it’s a chain, I checked), he danced the Labamba and would not let me leave, man you the second person this month to come in, and so you stay, not for Paco, although he can charm the needles off a porcupine, but you stay because he has the only light bulb that is lit in this state, because you got in the car in an ether gaze for dangerous lunacy and the circus-circus but instead are driving now and its fucking dark and paradise boulevard is mountains away you are the only one awake for miles, you are the only one awake for miles and you are in a Strugatsky novel of craters and the unseen, of mining outposts doing their Flash-Gordon dance and if you walk out they will chew you without looking, you are no longer on earth and you know it, you read over your own caption in the local news – Unidentified Ukrainian Male and Tumbleweed Found, Translator in Demand…

               .. I have Paolo Alto wunderkinds arguing about the perfect candy bar… million-dollar fathers in their homes of tall kitchens and efficiently warm fireplaces, retired satirists playing frisbee, I have a blue-lipped anarchists’ monologue about believing in yourself, a fruitshakers’ compulsive peace, a stoner’s scientific method of why grass is green, a mechanic who crashed his pickup the moment I had snapped the shutter on a cemetery, a wrinkled mother tending a gas station and waiting for her ivy-bound children, an Appalachian pre-war miner walking to see his wife on a Monday morning…

                                                                                                     …they are cliché, they are cheese so real you can smell its grease running into your sleeve, they are stories, they are so much more, the nine billion names of god flipping pancakes and jerking the Nevada slots and chain-smoking their motel salaries and driving back home and asking for directions and someone yawns and another one changes the station and we are thirty over the limit and in fifty more we will somewhere switch…