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   T h e  G R E E N Y  w o r l d  D o m i n a t i o n  T a s k  F o r c e ,
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                           "The Ride" by Franken Gibe

  ----- GwD:  The American Dream with a Twist -- of Lime ***** Issue #71 -----
            ----- release date:  11-25-99 ***** ISSN 1523-1585 -----

Riding on a sheet of afternoon glare.  it's over a hundred, i feel pricks of
cold sweat on my chest, under my arms - where it's dark and moist and smells
sharp, pungent and profane, where glossy black hairs coil like a bed of asps, or
twin cunts.  i feel dizzy and sick, and probably need to pull over, spew what's
left of the coke slurpee and sack of pretzels that's been rotting in my stomach
for an hour.  god it's hot.  i imagine the hell under the hood, the four
cylinders coughing and choking on each fiery wheeze of the carburetor, i think
the CO is messing my mind.  i keep seeing someone sitting next to me.  it's
after 4pm.  i've gotta drive till the sun dies, probably drive through the hot,
dry black of the desert night, i'll look out into the night, and i'll wonder
what the lights are that i pass, way out in the desert, what's out there, alone,
little islands of daytime, like sunlight from the afternoon stranded, caught in
some eddy.

97 degrees, 8:30pm or so.  i'm roaming the streets of Yuma, cuz i can't bear to
sit in the motel watching some showtime movie with kevin bacon who gets bitten
by a radioactive snake near alamagordo.  i drove by alamagordo three days ago.
i went to the sand dunes out there, an ocean of glare, and started taking off my
clothes.  it was almost a reflex.  i'm alone, sliding down pure white sand dunes
and roasting, disoriented, i can't see my car, it's behind that big dune, i
hope.  i try to video tape, but the camera can't deal with the glare, it stops
way the fuck down and the images just look like sand, like a big absurd sandbox
with me, half-naked, sputtering something about 'water...water,' and falling
down.  i still have sand caught in my ass. but that was nothing like it was.
cuz you look out, and the dunes are unbearably bright.  it's like the sun's been
atomized, and a billion billion grains of sunlight are scattered around, all of
'em blowing up in micro-novas.  sunglasses don't help.  squinting doesn't help.
you fall down.  you take off your clothes.  everything is overexposed.  you feel
like you're fading.  maybe that's why i stripped.  the overexposure is
intoxicating.  you wanna fade to white, like some jesus in one of those old
bible movies, you wanna be light, you wanna be a nova, explode without a sound,
sweat away your nasty little smelly sunburnt body and explode, a soundless
immense wonderful glare that you can't really see, you either close your eyes
and see red, or you open your eyes wide and fall down.

8:34pm.  i'm sitting in this parking lot in Yuma, Arizona, getting off on some
neon lights that're flashing at a liquor store.  i think they're supposed to
look like a satellite.  i get a kick out of that old fifties futurism:  the
asteroid motel; ground zero burgers; sputnik wine and spirits.  people came out
west back then, and probably thought they'd left earth.  there's some kid
sitting in my front seat with me.  he was skating around the parking lot.  he
said he's been in yuma all his life.  he just got off work at the mcdonald's.  i
tell him i'm just driving.  he says he'll help with the gas money.  the neon
light satellite looks like it's spinning on its axis, its a red and blue blur.
in the hot dry breath of this arizona night, i realize i'm lost.

Every interstate has a number, and the even numbers go east and west, the odd
numbers go north and south.  each number appears on a little shield, and when
you drive on the interstates you drive behind that shield.  you can't see shit,
except oncoming traffic.  you never have to ride through a town, or stop for a
light.  if you had enough gas, you really could drive behind that shield
forever, till you got hungry or old or lonely.  you could mark time not by the
change of seasons but of car models.  your philosophy would be the surface of
the road and its unending cycle of decay and repair.  your life would cease to
be a matter of months and years, but of miles per hour.  there're plenty of
signs, you can't get lost on an interstate, there's hardly any confusion.  i
stay off of them as much as i can.

My friend doesn't say much.  he watches the road blur out the side window. it
hypnotizes him into silence.  there's not much to say, cruising along the
blacktop at 75.  the windows are open, and the wind cuts through the car like a
wide-open jet engine.  any silence that isn't mangled by the wind is taken care
of by the radio, playing at full throttle.  sometimes i hear guitar feedback
beneath the roar.  driving through the desert in the mid-afternoon with the
windows down, no a/c and just a half-bottle of warm, stale water is wonderfully
absurd.  i blast down the highway, half-blind, half-delirious, half-asleep.
it's the kind of drive that paralyzes your senses.  tears are ripped out of my
eyes by the wind and dust.  the wind deafens me.  the heat leaves me in a pool
of cold sweat; numb, muscles hang like hot rubber.  the car spins forward crazy
and loud, i can't say i'm really in control.  it's now that driving becomes
unconscious, a trip, a rush.  speed is the drug, and it drags you along, limp
and sorta crazy.  and as long as you're awake, and as long as you can hold the
wheel, you're the pilot of this trip, and there's a four-valve in your chest and
radials strapped on your ankles.  out the windshield the dream flies by, the
joshua trees and the yellow lines and the sun in its hot arch, what a trip, what
a fucken high, wide-awake dreaming at 75 mph in the hot, bald sun on the
mirror-glare of the desert road.  "let's get a drink, let's stop, ok?" so my
friend's awake.  wakes me up, too. "next town."

I told him about my fall.  i was skating at midnight, january wind was cutting
into my face, made my ears hurt.  i hit hard, and felt dizzy the rest of the
month.  i told him how i'd stand in that cement ditch near Sam's Wholesale and
just stare.  it'd be an out-of-body experience, i'd see myself standing and
staring in the ditch, there i am, down below, and suddenly i'm so high, and i
see the cement ditch, and the cement runways into the ditch, the whole ditch
network, the canals from the interstate, the floodways near the lake, the
thousand thousand gutters stretching down all those suburban streets.  i saw the
pipes, the underground zig-zag of pvc and lead and concrete.  i could see the
land below stretched out like some immense integrated circuit.  i saw the
connections, the interconnections, all white cement and asphalt and bermuda
grass, broken Bud bottles and Big Mac boxes burst into a billion styro-bits.  i
tried to tell him how i felt, riding the banked concrete, surfing cement, the
Built Environment.  it's such a trip, y'know, riding a ditch.  it's a
revelation, it gives meaning to all the cement, the empty parking lots, all the
concrete and asphalt men pour onto the earth.  when i ride the cement, the
material world suddenly seems a lot less lonely, and i feel a lot less
alienated.  i wanted to say that's why i loved him, why i picked him up.  he
asked me about skate tricks.  i didn't have much to say on the subject, so we
ate our burritos in silence.

i'm not convinced that san francisco isn't a mirage, a ghost city that rolls in
with the bay fog in the morning, and fades away with the thick, grey fog in the
late afternoon.  sometimes, driving across the bridge from berkeley, the city
seems to be projected on the cloud banks by a magic lamp.  in the desert,
dematerialization is a matter of over-exposure.  in the city, it's a matter of
absorption.  the bay's dragon breath overtakes the city, engulfs it, absorbs it.
sometimes, the city can stay absorbed for days and days, and it's easy to
believe that it was only ever a delusion, so you walk the foggy streets and your
head rings with the sound of cable car bells.

My friend wanted to skate down by the customs house, there's a big plaza there.
i watched him ride, i watched the maybe 20 other skaters ride, like a cloud of
subatomics, bouncing off the pavement, the planters, the big cement fountain,
each other.  behind me, they were ripping down the Embarcadero, that part of
san francisco's unending labyrinth of freeways that had itself been bounced
around by the Not So Big One.  machines with teeth ate away at the two-story
road like parasites, gnawing away enormous slabs of cement.  the road stretched
out along the bay like the concrete corpse of a sea dragon, maybe one of the
dragon's with the foggy breath.  the road lay like carrion, and stank of hot
asphalt and rust.  the big machines moved in to digest and decompose.  a huge
iron ball swung back and forth, like a big pendulum, like a tidy metaphor for
time and time's crazy rapaciousness, the big ball slammed blindly into a
concrete support beam, each impact marked by a sonic boom, until the concrete
bone began to crumble, exposing twisted steel reinforcement rods like bent and
rusted nerves, or petrified veins.  finally another segment of the road-corpse's
steel and cement endoskeleton rumbled and crumbled into a pile of debris that
exhaled a weird yellow-brown cloud of dust, and people stood around and clapped,
and even the skaters stopped their incessant grinding and hopping and carving
for maybe a second, and copped a look.

"Sometimes i'm lonely when you're not in the car," i told him foolishly, though
it didn't feel foolish, just sorta sad.  "sometimes i'm lonely when i'm in the
car with you," he laughed, we laughed.  i decided i had secrets, and should keep
them to myself, like i always have done, like i always felt compelled to do.

I wanted to tell him why i often get choked up looking at maps, how i love to
look at the map of the U.S., the familiar outlines of states, how i fill in the
empty outlines with my memories, the weird reconstruction era shacks down in
mississippi, the big long long roads in west texas, new mexico scrub, those
dunes in arizona.  the map is my emotional compass, it's the big picture that
makes sense out of the miles and miles of homogeneity.  i'm having troubles with
this.  okay, it's like this, you drive into some town at night, in texas, or
nevada, maybe even somewhere out east like north carolina, maybe you get there
by the interstate, and that's when it's worst.  blue neon blockbuster vid.
stores.  and, 'course, all the fucken fast food places, and everything is so
fucken familiar, too familiar, too similar to everywhere else.  that's when the
vertigo hits, this nauseating post-conscious deja vu...yeah, i've seen it all
before, i'll see it all again.  it's bad at night cuz at night all you see are
the signs, and you look through the windshield and you don't see towns, but
commercials, advertisements, you see jingles.  i feel better when i look at the
map, when i can categorize the territory, and assure myself that, yes, i am
somewhere else, i'm in The South, i'm going West, whatever.  sometimes i have
bad dreams, though:  i'm driving the interstates, and all there are are rest
stops, and they're all the same, and i look out, and all i see are cars,
millions of cars, driving the blank verse of the freeways, and all along the way
are the strip malls and fast food places.  my friend thinks it's maybe a
conspiracy, and anyone who can't deal with the homogenization of the country
will have to run away, all the perverts, the misfits, everyone who can't be
Pasteurized, or Sani-Sealed.  i'm pretty depressed by now, and i picture myself,
old, hearing aids wired through my cranium, sitting with a styro-cup of coffee
in some midnight fast food joint, staring at a little crumpled piece of paper,
a map of the u.s, probably dribbling snot and tears till the ink runs, and the
map just fades.

Haight st. made me crazy.  we went there every morning we were in the city, cuz
i knew this girl who worked at a painfully hip cafe place on south haight and
she'd give us free coffee.  haight st. is like one of the holy places of hip, a
mecca or medina for the post-grad., post-suburban beats and punks and rads.
sometimes i'll look at The Map, and i'll imagine little stars, like the stars
used to indicate state capitals, 'cept these stars are next to Really Cool
Places in america.  capitals of cool, and haight st. was one of these, and as
annoying as it shoulda been, washed out, contradictory, commodified, scary and
stupid.  white kids in cafes and black kids pushing.  i can't think of the place
we'd go to, but it was like a texmex place, and they had pretty good coffee and
did tasty things to eggs and charged too much.  i knew i didn't wanna grow up to
be hip, but i was confused, cuz what was i gonna do?  in the desert, High
Speed's trash compactor squashes the past and the future into the present, balls
up the moment...so that the moment takes over, and you know the answer - drive,
just drive.  but then you sit on your ass on haight, and the moment shrinks like
a spent erection, it gets reduced to coffee grounds, and the past and the future
creep out of dark corners, they're etched in the waiter's scowl, or in the
rhythm of the street walkers, roaming haight like wolves, ready to pounce on the
weak and uncertain.

The fog was rolling over the city's skyscrapers, through its alleys, its cracks
and crevices, like a bad horror flick, and we were on the road, south, maybe
west, i think it mattered even less at the time.  he started talking crazy, i
thought maybe he'd dropped a tab, cuz he was talking a lot.  he said he really
liked taking shits, or pissing while in motion, while on a plane, for instance,
or a train, or in on a bus, when you're half-choked by that nauseous sweet pink
smelling deodorizer.  he said he liked to imagine what it'd be like if you
peeled away the plane's skin, all of it, then you'd see yourself maybe
30,000ft. in the air, zipping along at 500mph, all crouched up and dropping
fecal ordnance on the patchwork quilt america way down below.  or, you know, if
the greyhound disappeared, but by inertia you just kept moving, suspended maybe
5 ft. above the interstate taking a whiz, and truckers would honk their airhorns
and other people would honk and blink their headlights and your piss stream
would stretch out for yards and yards.  i thought this all sounded familiar,
like some existential version of Kant, cuz, you know, you could imagine yourself
doing all sorts of things, and then imagine what you'd look like doing them if
the world just sorta vanished, and there you are, in the spotlight of some
enormous void, jacking off, or making jello, or picking filth out of your
toenails, or drinking a slurpee, and man, i can't think of many things, short of
wiping some aids victim's sores, that wouldn't seem completely absurd.  it's
like, even an exemplary act, even an act that could become a universal law seems
pointless and petty or just weird and sorta haunted when you project it on the
void, when you peel back the exoskeleton.  everything we do seems as stupid and
surreal as some kid soaring through the stratosphere, crouched over, taking a
dump.

Near gallup, new mexico, he wanted to stop, so we stopped, and the day was
fading, and i could feel the hot highbeam of the setting sun on the back of my
neck, the orange sun, angry and sore.  "what a rip-off," i said, glancing in my
rearview to see if the sunset was safe yet, if i could stare at it yet and not
go blind.  "what?" he wondered, and i pointed to a billboard that said we could
get tax-free booze and cigarettes if we took the next exit onto navajo land.  he
didn't say anything, i guess he knew what i meant, so i swung the car around and
we watched the sky burn up into blue-grey cinders till we got hungry and went
looking for burritos.

It was really late and we both couldn't sleep and i, at least, was pretty sure
the motel's air conditioning was coating my lungs with some as yet untreatable
pathogenic mildew, so we took off, drove out of town and parked, listening to
the radio bleat out old bonnie raitt tunes while we lay side by side on the
hood, staring at the deep deep black sky pricked all over with stars.  i told
him about route 666, the devil's highway, and how i'd read that some schizo
satanist had built a gateway (a lot of wrought iron and crazy talismanic
symbols) somewhere near el paso, where he thought the highway began, and how
other people think the trinity site is some transdimensional gateway, or maybe a
ufo landing site, and people who live near los alamos see ufo's all the time.
he thought the radiation had screwed everyone up, but i just looked around, and
i could feel the new mexico nite, its hot breath on my body, the stars' electric
humming up above, maybe the black ghosts of the mesas way in the distance, and i
could believe it all.  the land of enchantment.  he moved a little closer, and i
could feel the heat radiating from his body, now, and i could hear him
breathing, his heart beating, and he told me about the mesas around yuma; how in
the midsummer you could see their silhouettes all nite since the sunset never
completely faded.  he told me that when he was little, he'd wander outside late
at night and talk to the silhouettes, cuz he could feel them, they never slept,
he felt them like you feel someone staring at you even though you're alone.  and
when he got older, he'd hike up into the hills and watch the lites of yuma
flickering in the late hour, and he'd feel sorry for his little town in the
desert, and he could see as it slept in the summer night that it was frail and
exposed.  he turned to me, and i stared into the charcoal black holes where his
eyes used to be, and we breathed each other's exhalations until the dew and the
dawn.

At carlsbad, i was beginning to feel sad cuz i knew i couldn't drive forever,
and my loneliness hurt worse cuz i wasn't alone, and, man, it was hot, and the
sky was just sort of a washed out white, bleached out by the heat.  we clambered
into the giant sphincter hole and just kept hiking deeper and deeper into the
cool, dark bowels of the west, which just made me sadder, cuz there're no
secrets or treasures or answers under all that grand big haunted land, just
caves, rock formations, crystals lit up by track lites.  the whole place smelled
of mildew and sunscreen and bat guano.  we were both half-asleep when the west
finally moved its bowels and left us in a heap beneath the greying sky.  we
watched the bats swarm out of the caves like a blur, like the ghosts you see
when you close your eyes, that you can never look at directly, cuz when you do
they vanish.  i don't know how long we slept, but when the ranger shook us awake
it was very dark and god only knows where the bats had gone.

I had to see the ocean again.  we drove all night, and most of the next day, and
i just felt sad and lonely cuz i knew he wanted to get back to yuma, and that'd
be it.  it was a long drive, and everything was sort of flip-flopped, cuz the
desert was like the sea, and we were adrift on the desert like castaways.  it
was night again when we drove into santa cruz, and the boardwalk was closed and
the ferris wheel and the roller coaster hung in the sky, dark and still.  it was
chilly, and i could hear the breakers and the pacific was ink black, a void that
sucks in the heartbeats of castaways, and that's the noise i heard, the rhythmic
pulse of the surf is the sound of stolen heartbeats.  no one was around, and it
seemed like my loneliness had swallowed me whole, here i was, goose-fleshed and
shivering in the void.  he got restless so we got in the car and turned around
and drove back into the desert.

That was the last time.  now yuma's ahead, a bright smear along the desert's
brow.  i stop about 5 miles east of town, and i get scared, cuz it all looks the
same, i think i recognize a coupla buildings.  it's weird, if you stand back far
enough, things seem the same, they don't change.  but i guess you can't spend
your life parked 5 miles this side of change, or of time.  inevitably you get
hungry, or bored, and you move in, and time moves in behind you, and you're
trapped.  that's when it's time to screech out of town and drive after the
setting orange sun.  and if you drive fast enough, maybe you can keep up, and
the sun won't set, it'll just fucken hang in the sky, orange and angry, forever.

[cDc communications holds the copyright for the first three paragraphs of this
file.  Text from "Angry Sun" copyright (c) 1997 cDc communications, reprinted by
permission of the author.

                        -=< HISTORY OF THIS ARTICLE >=-

circa 1993:  This file appears as a G-File on Franken Gibe's BBS, The /<ingdom
             of Shit.
      1997:  cDc communications publishes an abridged version of the file (the
             first three paragraphs only), calling it "Angry Sun" (cDc331.txt).
      1999:  GwD secures Franken Gibe's permission and blessing before
             publishing the file in its entirety (including Gibe's original
             capitalization and paragraph structure.)]

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              "I've been everywhere, man.  I've been everywhere."
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MORE THAN FIVE YEARS of ABSOLUTE CRAP!                         /---------------\
copyright (c) 1993 Franken Gibe/copyright (c) MCMXCIX GwD Pubz :FIGHT THE POWER:
copyright (c) MCMXCIX GwD, Inc., except as noted               :      GwD      :
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