21st Century Bogatyr: Cerveza & Barbecue Before I Go

"The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.” Anaïs Nin

by Zvi Baranoff

[This is Part 6 of a fictional work in progress. Links to the rest are at the bottom of this page.]

When we got back to the cottage, I found that pulsating colors and sounds had significantly diminished. I looked about the place and did not find any mountain lions lurking, which was reassuring.

We sat for a while in Abuelo's private greenhouse. Abuelo tuned the radio to the jazz station and we played a few rounds of chess.

Throughout the world, whether one is in London or New York or Peoria or Timbuktu, a nearly unlimited number of choices for clear quality digital sounds are accessible, however the Zone has been severed from access. Radio in the Zone consists of two low powered broadcast stations that can be picked up by turning a knob and wiggling an antenna.

At the time of the crackdown when the communication curtain fell, there was a low power community radio station in the neighborhood that operated out of the basement of the Unitarian Church.

Three different factions fought over control of the equipment. For a very short while they tried a rotating schedule, but that proved unworkable. Somehow, they ended up with three stations - two controlled by Marxists and one struggled over between Anarchists and Nihilists. All the stations broadcast nonstop propaganda and few people tuned in.

The ideological bickering served no purpose and before long the cadres of the revolution found that they had little incentive to keep trying to enlighten a potential listening audience that was significantly more concerned about food and shelter than dialectics and ideological nuances. Eventually music enthusiasts took over and two stations remained on the air. One plays jazz and the other rock and roll.

Abuelo played chess quite well and decimated me repeatedly. I was a bit distracted by the ongoing effects of the mushrooms. The knight and the bishop were never in agreement and kept offering me contradictory advice. All of the advice was suspect, inevitably resulting in zugzwang, which really seemed to reflect my overall situation beyond the chessboard, as well.

"I am expecting Maria soon," Abuelo said. Of course, that would not be a particularly unusual thing to be said anywhere else but it had a very odd ring to it in the Zone.

I looked up from the chessboard, quite surprised. "Soon?" I asked. "Not 'some-some?'"

Abuelo took a gold pocket watch out and opened it. "Within the hour," he said, without hesitation or even a nod to the unusual nature of either that statement or the watch in a land that had abolished time.

"While nearly everyone calls me Abuelo," he said, "Maria actually is my great granddaughter. She is dear to my heart. Responsible, industrious, a third generation Salvager. A pillar of the community."

Personally, I continued to have mixed feelings about her. Perhaps she wasn't the guttersnipe or parasitic opportunist that I first perceived her to be, but she had stolen my money and my pistol and she continued to wear my favorite pair of boots.

"In fact, we share a birthday," he continued. "Tuesday, actually, which is tomorrow. She is a very mature young lady. She is younger than she appears. Tomorrow she turns twenty."

Birthday, he said! Twenty, he said! Soon, he said! Tuesday, he said! Tomorrow, he said! He said all these things while looking at a pocket watch. I am thinking that my head might explode as I absorb all this seemingly contradictory stimuli.

I felt momentarily catapulted out of the Zone and back into the world almost as I sort of understood it, but not quite. Abuelo paid no attention to my awed expression and the confused look that I didn't even try to hide.

We gave up on chess and Abuelo began once again to pontificate on the transitions and changes that took place after the lockdown.

"The politicos continued with their marathon meetings. They argued endlessly about ideology and structure. They were divided into multiple factions and the hair splitting was excruciating. Each faction insisted that they alone knew how to 'make things work' and none of them knew diddly-squat about anything other than dialectical argumentation."

The people that remained in the Zone had to find ways to survive and they had to do so with no governmental structures and no economic system to speak of. They lacked any sort of enforcement or fiscal incentive. No laws and no money and no bosses and hardly a clue about how to go about to survive the embargo that was being enforced on them by the Federales.

In addition to the embargo, the Federales had another dirty trick up their sleeve. While they inhibited the flow of material goods and information, they allowed a fairly steady stream of escaped convicts, bail jumpers, probation evaders and other sorts of displaced criminals and social deviants to slip through the borders to "escape" into the Zone.

This served two purposes. The primary goal was for these ne'er-do-wells to put a disruptive social pressure on the fragile social ecosystem of the Zone. A secondary benefit for the authorities was the exiling of their undesirables, freeing up enforcement and/or social service personnel and expenses. This was a win-win for the State and potentially devastating for the Zone.

However, it did not actually work out as they planned. According to my host, the influx of new people actually energized the community and people that could not fit into the highly structured demands outside of the Zone did quite well in this land without the constraints of law or many social norms.

While I had lived and moved on and off within the shadows of the criminal underground, it struck me odd that there might be a sort of place that made criminals comfortable and welcomed. I knew that there were an awful high percentage of criminal types that I would rather not live in close proximity to. I asked Abuelo how that could possibly work out well.

"Well," he told me. "We believe in the transformative power of community. Criminality is a social construct. Laws make criminals. Force leads to counter force. Also, we believe in the power of change. Besides that, the community's attitude towards the concept of 'time' frees us from the constraints, prejudices and chains of the past. What one may have done once does not define the person or their trajectory. We believe in acceptance, tolerance and mutual respect."

"What's the difference between a weed and a flower?" he asked, I think rhetorically.

"Or," he continued somewhat abstractly, "consider the way vining plants grow. Grape vines climb and cling and grow on trellises. They will also wind about fences and tree limbs. How far will a grapevine grow after it reaches the end of a branch?".

"We each grow to our natural limits. We don't grow in straight rows like Iowa or Nebraska's corn," he tells me. "We are wildflowers."

"Perhaps so," I answered him.

I withheld my opinion on the matter. It seemed implausible to me. On the other hand, I saw no obvious signs of criminal or antisocial behavior anywhere I had been in the Zone. Maybe they really did find a way to live without laws or crime. What did I know?

The various community gardens provided a beginning framework for the development of a permaculture system, including even a few chickens and goats.

Before long, the few goats grew to a couple of true herds and those that cared for them adopted the name Goat Boys, although they were not all youths and more than half the Goat Boys were women.

There were a few bee hives as well in the old neighborhood. They were expanded upon and those that cared for the hives became known as Bee Watchers, named after the character in the Dr. Seuss book.

The Salvagers, including Maria's grandmother, worked at dismantling buildings for useful materials. The Salvagers also became a cadre of smugglers and essential providers of those things that could not be produced within the Zone and that couldn't or wouldn't be given up.

Well, clearly the ethos and principles and values of the Salvagers ran deep in the community, but I still had some issues concerning my personal losses and I delicately raised them with Abuelo.

He proceeded to respond by repetition of all the same points and positions that Maria had presented to me when I regained consciousness about the Laws of Salvage and Flotsom and Jetsam and Finders Keepers. He also raised discussion points concerning the distinction between personal and private property, quoting Mikhail Bakunin and Vladimir Lenin as well as citing Hogamus Higamous, Ipso Facto and Higamous Hogamus as well as Darwinian Theory concerning Survival of the Fittest.

He was not real reassuring or supportive of my sense of ownership rights, however he did suggest that I discuss it all further with Maria when she arrived. He insisted that she was a fair and reasonable person and anyway I would need to work something out with her regarding her help guiding me out of the Zone and back to my car.

Sometime likely within the hour as Abuelo had stated, Maria did show up with a few friends in tow. They brought with them a recently butchered hog and goat, a couple of buckets of homebrew beer, a few gallons of homemade wine and sacks of potatoes and cabbages. Someone switched the radio to the rock station and they fired up the barbeque and made enough potato salad and coleslaw for an army.

As the day wore on, more and more people showed up. The cottage became loud, smokey, boisterous, joyful. There were no obvious recognizable telltales of a birthday party. No one brought presents and no cakes with candles to be seen, but I knew that it was the eve the birthday of both Abuelo and Maria. Abuelo, of course, knew this as well. Everyone else seemed to be blissfully disconnected from the slavery of calendars and time.

In spite of the denial of chronology, the people at the party tended to group in clusters of similar age. Abuelo was circled by other senior members of the community. None appeared to be quite as old as my host but most seemed to be my contemporaries or not much younger than I. The old folks talked of times long gone, even if they lacked a mechanism to measure such a thing.

The young folks busied themselves in the here and now with mostly idle chatter. They kept the food and drink circulating and flowing and the noise level fairly consistent.

Afternoon flowed into evening and evening into night and the party showed no hints of fading or ebbing. The barbeque and beer were superb. I reminded myself that barbeque and cerveza were the reasons that I detoured to Chicago. I noted that I had found there better than I ever could have hoped for within the official borders of that city. In fact, I found better cooking and far better beer than I would likely anywhere else in North America.

Nonetheless, by coming to Chicago, I suffered through the sonic attack and was shanghaied and rolled as well.

As this thought crossed my mind, I noted that the hallucinatory effects of the mushrooms had subsided and that I felt better, much better, than I had felt for a long, long time. The aftershocks from the sonic attack were gone. No more doner and blizam. No more waves of panic. No more discomfort and pain. In fact, I felt better than I did before I left home on this fool's mission.

Well, except that I had lost an uncertain amount of time as well as my gun, my boots and a measurable amount of contraband currency. I figured that it was as good of a time as any to approach this subject with Maria. She stood aloof from the partying throngs. She was on the porch scanning the night sky and smoking by herself.

We went back and forth about it all. I really couldn't get her to budge much as she was firmly committed to the Principles of Finders Keepers. She did offer to guide me out of the Zone and to my car for a small fee! I pointed out to her that she had already taken all of my money, which she did not deny in the least but she said that she was quite sure that I had something in my car of value that I would be able to give her once we got there. She told me that she trusted me to be fair with her and if she didn't get me safely to my ride, there was no charge! Hmm…

As far as my gun was concerned, she shrugged and said that I could have it back right then and there as she had no use for it because she already owned a better one. She reached into her jacket and handed it to me, right on the porch with no concerns for being observed and without fanfare or ceremony. She was, however, keeping my ankle holster, she told me, because she quite liked it. And my boots? She rolled her eyes, shrugged her shoulders and smiled. I wrote off the boots.

She promised to come get me "some-some" after sunrise to guide me through the gauntlet of the blockade and through the rough streets of Chicago to the car park so I could get back on the road. Then she drifted off into the darkness and down the trail. The party continued beyond any measurement of time, although the crowd did begin to dwindle eventually and the volume decreased somewhat.

I went to bed while the party continued in the rest of the house. When I woke, there were still quite a few guests in various conditions and in various positions along the spectrum between asleep and awake scattered about the cottage.

I walked around some and over others on my way to the kitchen. Abuelo was already sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee. Maria was at the stove cooking breakfast.

Links to the earlier posted parts of this story, Chapters 1 - 26.

Part 1: Grace and Mercy If Luck Holds

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/05/grace-and-mercy-if-luck-holds.html?m=1

Part 2: Everything Was Fine Until It All Went Sideways

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/07/everything-was-fine-until-it-all-went.html

Part 3: I Blink In & Out and Awakened In the Zone

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/07/i-blink-in-out-and-awakened-in-zone.html

Part 4: Out Of Time

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/07/out-of-time.html

Part 5: Even Without Clocks

https://21stcenturybogatyr.blogspot.com/2020/07/even-without-clocks.html

Part 6: Cerveza & Barbecue Before I Go