21st Century Bogatyr: Grace and Mercy If Luck Holds

(Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.)

by Zvi Baranoff

Enough is as good as a feast and it's all a party until the food and booze and dope are gone. Not enough, well...the Laws of Karma determine everything.

Scarcity can play havoc and then Karma has a way of running over Dogma and everything is up for grabs. That Three Musketeers All for One and One for All Che Guevara stuff gives way to watching out for number one.

When there are unmet needs and unkept promises there is trouble in Paradise. Push comes to shove. If you don't have enough push you will get shoved. I was going through another of those recurring stages of shortages. I do not tolerate prolonged deprivation, so something has to happen and nothing much happens until I make it so.

Lately, I have been accused of not remembering things but it is not true that I don't remember. However, my sense of linear time has altered and is perhaps fractured. I have been thinking about a cat that used up the last of his nine lives a half century ago...

You see, I remember everything but not necessarily in any sort of order. I remember my past. I remember the future. I remember things that may have happened or might happen or could have happened or happened to someone else or never happened at all. Maybe it is all for the best. Maybe it is a survival technique and I just haven't figured out yet how it is useful.

Every creature has its survival techniques. Some climb trees to avoid predators. Some learn to run fast or fly. There is a bug that, when swallowed by a frog, will shit something that makes the frog barf him up. Whatever works.

My personal survival mechanism is to emulate the chameleon. I am cold blooded. I have a detachable tail. I can alter my outer appearance and I eat flies.

We each face choices and make our own compromises with reality. Everyone works, steals or deals and we all end up serving somebody.

Eventually, even a chameleon is eaten by a bird or battered beyond survivability by a cat or simply dies of old age. No survival technique is foolproof and I am not fool enough to believe that I will last forever, but I have managed to become a very old lizard.

Back when I started out guys would just throw their shit in a backpack or a suitcase and get on a train or a plane. It was as simple as that.

Then they introduced X-rays and dogs and sensors and drones and robotic who knows what and an interlocking computer web that serves all of our needs and fulfills our every wish and tracks our every move and most every thought.

We adapt to the world as it is or we become extinct. I am not quite ready for extinction. This is a time of blurred distinctions and the blurring of the lines seems to be accelerated. One need be particularly flexible in such times.

Mobile uploaded reality in multi dimensional, printed formats impose the artifact creations into what we always thought of as reality. It happens at a breakneck pace.

I did a stretch of a few years away in a box and when I got out there was this new thing called Facebook. Everyone was using it. We were all suddenly connected and sharing and tagging and poking each other. All the phones became smart and the people it seemed became less so.

As the seamlessness of the systems improved, the web fulfilled more of our social needs and those in other cities and other time zones and on other continents and for all I know in other dimensions or other planets appeared to be as real and relevant as anything else.

Time however lost all relevance and that proved to be a problem. Video monitors for the kids and automatic feeding stations for Fido and Fifi and a flashing signal to remind us to pee do help reduce the deaths and kidney failures. So it goes.

The robotic cleaner mostly takes care of my living space. Weekly food delivery assures that there are meals available. The internet monitors breathing and pulse and blood pressure. If I pass out or drop dead while absorbed in Internet No Time they will eventually send out the meat wagon to gather me up. I suppose that one way of going is as good as another.

I had been on a bit of a “social media” bender for a couple of months. It was time to get off the couch and make something happen in the physical world.

The rent was overdue and the cutoff threat notices for utilities were getting to that critical point with exclamation points and asterisks and large fonts in the oh so serious electronic messages.

Everything changes but some things don't change much. They still insist on getting paid and will leave you high and dry if they don't get enough do-ray-mi before the due date or there will be consequences and blah blah blah.

So, I disconnected from the Internet jag and set out to see what I could still accomplish in the world of flesh and blood and humans and gods. With a clean shave and a semi cleared mind I was as ready as I ever would be, to face life head on, as much as I would prefer to just stay home and ignore it all, because sometimes that's just not a choice.

I burned some sage. I chanted and prayed. I laid out the Tarot Cards and tossed the I Ching coins. On the way out of the door, as I stepped over the threshold, I reached my right hand up to the mezuzah that hangs in the doorway and briefly brushed it with my fingertips and then brought my fingertips to my lips. I then cross myself and ritually incant my mantra; spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch.

I hit the keyboard outside the door and engage the electronic security protocol for the house. As I walk through the garden on the way to my car, I rub the fat belly of the statue of Buddha and I scratch my current garden mouser behind his ears and he purrs appreciatively. I figure that I have all my ends covered for now about as best as I can hope. Rituals are important. Maybe it will be alright.

Then the giraffe bolted across the Redwood Highway a few miles below Cave Junction, just in front of my car. I hit the breaks and skidded off the road, bouncing against the guardrail before coming to a complete stop.

I reached under the driver's seat to confirm that the handgun was where it always is. I checked my jacket pocket to assure myself that a flask of whiskey was sitting comfortably in its place. I pulled a reefer from my cigarette case and lit it, taking a couple of hits before pulling back onto the highway towards the coast.

The giraffe was very much out of place. I had a strong sense that the day was rapidly slipping out of my control.

I coded the O'Brien Country Store, Casino and Bordello/Hotel into the car's computer and minutes later I was pulling in at the blinking light.

When I first came to Southern Oregon it was just the Country Store and a campground out back. There was an ancient police car sitting out in front of the place and an antique railroad car plopped into the parking lot. The store also doubled as a Post Office back then although few people now even remember the Postal Service. Neither rain nor snow! Hah.

Other than the police car out front and railroad car in the parking lot and the outer appearance of the historic Country Store, there have been a lot of changes. The luxury hotel dominates the horizon. The robot bordello off to one side and the casino off to the other. The parking lot was crowded and there were a few small planes on the landing field.

Lone Mountain Road still runs uphill past the complex. It is now a four lane rather than two. Naue Way still forks off of Lone Mountain Road and that is still only two lanes although there has been a push lately to widen it.

I lived up that way for a while during the shantytown period. There was a lot of irregular housing and unregulated contractual relationships. Rednecks and hippies and bikers and Christians and Back to Landers and a few artists and writers and druggies and thieves and some just regular folks lived in Obrien. During prohibition they all grew weed and there were a few clandestine meth labs.

Now the Villages of O'Brien is a gated community with high end homes. I wouldn't pass the background or credit check to live there. I couldn't pass the background checks for employment at the entertainment complex either for that matter, not that there are a lot of jobs or any jobs for a fucker as old as I am. Still, they need some folks doing actual stuff that a machine can't really do, especially in these luxury joints.

Most of the work around there, like everywhere else, is automated. Robots and other machines keep the place clean and the shelves stocked and the customers relatively happy.

Most of the weed is grown on big farms and all the pharmaceutical concoctions one could dream of are made in big laboratories and delivered right to your door by service drones 24 hours a day.

Time rolls on and it goes as it will. I bought myself a burrito, a cold beer and an ersatz cigar from the machine and took a short break from it all. Ersatz cigars! Humph!

While I smoked the Ersatz I found my mind drifting back to those days when there was an embargo on Cuba and the boat captains in Florida would hook me up with caseloads of Cuban cigars which I could sell to rich New York fucks that gladly paid premium prices for the forbidden luxury. I developed a taste for them and they could put a few kopecks in my pocket.

The Ersatz is reminiscent of the real thing in form and practice. I like the way the smoke drifts as my thoughts drift and it gives me something to do with my hands while I think or think about thinking.

I should be thinking about how I am going to be pulling off this trip but all I can think about is the fucking giraffe that crossed the highway. It didn't belong there. It made no sense and it is probably bad luck. You need to watch for signs and warnings and hidden meanings and maybe it meant something but I sure did not know what.

I doubt I was any clearer by the time I decided to get back on the road but my heartbeat was more regular and I was in as good of shape as I was going to be in. I reset the trip controls programming “self” driven to the coast, temperature settings, music and a mild hypnotic. I locked the steering wheel out of the way and reclined the seat for some kickback time.

It still strikes me funny that we use the term “self driving” when we mean that the computer and web controlled travel. The “self” becomes the passive consumer of the service provided. I have no more control over how the language is used than I have over the technology of the day. Sometimes you just have to give in to the controls, or give up to the Higher Powers or some such shit.

So, I was just about comfortably zonked when I felt the car “self guide” to the stop on the side of the road and awoke to the pulsating strobe lights. The immediate instinctual anxiety bordering on terror that washed over me like a wave rescinded as a wave as well while the hypnotic wore off and I remembered where I was and what was going on.

I wasn't driving and I wasn't carrying and I wasn't doing anything criminal at the moment. What the heck was this cop tossing me for? I am not even out of Josephine County yet.

I looked out the window as the cop approached my car and felt a sense of relief. This one's OK, I think while I rack my head trying to remember his name.

As I lowered the window I just start talking, loud and pushy and directing the course of this encounter.

“What the fuck is with you and the godam lights?” I asked. I hadn't remembered his name. He turned down the strobe with his handheld from the pulsing to something somewhat more soothing.

“No problems,” he tells me. “I haven't seen you in a long time and wanted to check in with you.” I assured my old “friend” that I was not dead yet and in fairly good shape for the shape I was in.

“So,” I asked him, “What do you know about a giraffe running around these parts?”

“I can tell you this. I don't know anything, there is nothing I can or want to do about it and any issues surrounding it are above my pay level.”

OK. At least I confirmed that it was really there and I was not being pranked and I was not hallucinating. All that was left to believe was that the sighting was potentially an evil omen. I carry a talisman to ward off evil and maybe it will help.

“Bubba, how are the wife and kids?” I ask the cop. I still had not remembered his name, but Bubba will usually work when memory fails. It worked fine for now.

“The kids all moved to the city years ago and now have kids of their own. Everyone is fine.” I remembered the old days when he was growing weed and his kids would run around barefoot all summer long. Now he is a cop and the kids are grown and I am still running in circles.

He leans into the window and lowers his voice. “Be careful out there. They have some new sniffer equipment that they are using in California. Keep your head down and put an extra seal or two on your packages. I don't want to be reading about you in the newsfeeds. And keep the car on self-drive until you get at least a couple of miles past that security inspection at the border.”

It pays to have friendly relationships. The old cocksucker gave me an important tip. If this trip goes well I will have to break him off a little something. That is the way Karma works. That is how I maintain some balance in the Universe, I am thinking as I let the car drive me southward.

Links to the rest of this story, so far.