Flight Plan for a Piirate
Old friends and distant strangers. Losers, lovers, dark side drifters.
Welcome to the road untravelled, it’s the loneliest road in America, route Five Zero in the naked state of Nevada. I am the Hungry Raven talking to you live to air on pirate radio DOA, Deserts of America, Dead on Arrival, all dead all the time. You give me ninety minutes and I’ll give you eternity; that’s DOA as in Deliriously Opinionated Aggression, Dangerously Outrageous Aspirations, Decadent Or Artful, the choice is yours.
Come fly with me along the loneliest road in America, the road of bonanza and borrasco, boom and bust.
Within a ten mile radius from where I sit you will find ghost towns, old abandoned mines, a circle K convenience store where you can load up on devil dogs, blue gatorade and barbecue chips. You will also find an unusual assortment of neighbors holding an unusual assortment of opinions.
I have one neighbor who believes that the brain of our current President was stolen by the Mossad and now sits in an airless case in a fortified Tel Aviv basement, and that inside the head of the President, to fill the empty space so that the White House physician won’t freak out there is nothing but an old pot holder stained with red blood from last year’s Thanksgiving roast beef, and another neighbor who believes that within the next one hundred years, all Mexicans will live in Canada, and all Canadians will live in Mexico, and the United States will be transformed into one big gringolandia truck stop mini-golf theme casino bowling alley, and for the rest of time Canada and Mexico will just trade places, and that will be the new definition of a dynamic society, and the U. S. of A. will become the medium for this rotation, and nothing more, all else will be erased and obliterated and forgotten.
I believe that each of these theories conveys some grain of truth, because it’s that kind of place this no place, and it’s that kind of time this no time, and it’s that kind of play this no play, like a white string stretched across a mud puddle and the puddle gone all punky with bacteria, invisible but potent, enough to make you way sick in a heartbeat and the string, the one that promises todo esta bueno, turns out to be nothing but a vapor trail left by an F-16 on the way to the no fly zone called Charlie November November, that’s CNN.
As I hunt this hot and naked road, the elegant halogen lamps still burn brightly all around America, and inside the neat McMansions martini husbands debate their botox wives and botox husbands debate their martini wives whether it is prudent to own one Italian deluxe expresso machine or two; one German made überwagen or two; one electric vibrating – toothbrush – or two; while in the secure corridors of power, tailored suits stuffed with sugar water and salt trade deeply felt and poorly thought notions on how it is that the universe might best be painted in red white and blue, and how it is that all peoples in all times and all colors might come to love styrofoam coffee cups and neon sports bras, and plastic lawn ornaments in the Disney style, and airports the size of small cities, and dead bodies piled high on sale at the Walmart.
Yes, as I fly along this long and empty road you can still buy a Happy Meal for less than a dollar and a shirt made in China for less than ten, and the average American still carries a little bit more than nine credit cards and a little bit less than one Bible, but that doesn’t matter because the whole world knows yes the whole world knows that we are the Righteous People of God and if you want proof I can give you proof and the proof is that millions of Americans brandish spanking new titanium golf clubs stored inside sleek black body bags and they build them wherever they want, the golf courses, until every swinging dick and his dog has a private club and every club has a private clubhouse where members hang their silken banana hammocks on platinum hooks.
Oh yes, fellow citizens of the super-sized empire, we are ready to drive down the wide open fairway or the freeway or the American way. Ready to rock, ready to roll, ready to refi.
Lonely drifters, dark strangers, luscious friends of the long night, all around me there’s a vast network of abandoned mines, and inside those mines lay abandoned dreams, and inside those dreams, the spirits of the vanquished gather and they dance the ghost dance, and they call out to the Great Warrior who will come and end this agony with a rifle on a stallion or a death ray in a spaceship or more likely by a trillion small and painful wounds, invisible but true, each wound yielding a single drop of blood, and if you look into their eyes, the ghost dancers, you can see the future free and clear, you can see that the wolves shall run again in the deserts of Nevada and eat the abundant road kill, the big spoils from the big dump in the big time that will follow the brief catastrophe.
And you can hear it all right here on pirate radio DOA in the United States of America so come fly with me, for I am the Hungry Raven, over and over and over and over and out. A hungry raven in the sky, a wounded rabbit slow to die, bones piled in the sun, America has all the fun.
America has all the fun
