Wednesday, May 12, 2010

re-runs

An inborn dread, a sort of latent panic familiar to my line, preceded me. This inherent conviction that things must go wrong will not be loosed by any device of socialization, rebellion, or medication. Ironically, this same fixedness in the breast of its unfortunate host makes it perfectly portable, and impervious to geography--maybe this is why my people have propelled themselves across all parts of the globe, as if in flight from this dread; maybe this is why now we seem determined to self-dissipate as a race. We can run but we can't hide.

Even this curious adaptation works as if it has its own ambition and designs, treating us as the means to our own end. A long line of dull, placid farmers crossed the Atlantic to become dull, placid American farmers, settling in square-head country in the perennially freezing dead-center of the continent, where we felt at home. At some point we were displaced from land to city, and, characteristically unaware, set upon a modest decline from modest heights. We are being deselected.
The pioneers came west drawn by horses on wooden wheels over wild country. Years later it was rubber on asphalt, a trail of noxious fumes, and little fortitude required. A group bound by no comparable shared act of passage, by nothing in particular. I am of this family.
The last leg of our white trash odyssey was the motor journey into the American West, merging along the way with the Okies and the wetbacks, with the disillusioned alongside the delusional, the failed and the ambitious, those on the lamb and them on the make, all holding in common a crisis of options; to California.

7 comments:

Wido Incognitus said...

When you reach the Pacific Ocean (the White Trash Odyssey ENDS when you find somebody who mistakes your fan for winnowing grain with a surfboard) you build Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Not so bad. There is no dread without spirit.

Dennis Dale said...

That wasn't us. As the Okie said when viewing the lights of "Hollywood" from the hills: might as well be a million miles away.

Dennis Dale said...

I did the waterproofing on a parking structure on the Warner lot once--across from the Brisco County Jr. set.

Dennis Dale said...

Disney felt like the Scientologists, even from the construction pit.

Dennis Dale said...

And then there's Bakersfield...

DaveinHackensack said...

And Fresno. I drove there and back from San Francisco once with a colleague from Salt Lake City. We easterners sometimes forget that the Central Valley is California too.

Dennis Dale said...

The Central Valley is Kansas for about ten hours north of Bakersfield. Sometimes you'll pass one of the giant cattle herds just off the five; if the wind's right (wrong, actually) you'll smell it before you see it (if you even see it).
The herd makes dark-brown acres of rolling hills as far as you can see to the East. This is the funnel's opening; all these animals bound for restaurants, mostly burgers. It's really brutal when you think about it; enslaved now, they will be soon ground into meal and profaned by us as a trivial food. I don't know, it just makes me kind of

hungry. Excuse me.

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