Powers of Ten #1

I turn right and drive on up the driveway, and park behind the bus. It's sleeping. I am thinking about the last Burning Man festival, and how it traversed the playa carrying people from all walks, roaming the land and digging into the esoterica of a barren landscape, invaded by geeks with computers and generators. I shut my car off and we walk around the huge yard that my friend reveals selectively with a flashlight. We are each thinking on different planets, with different flora and fauna, different shapes and lines, different inhabitants. However, we are thinking under the pretenses of the same physical laws, the same mission. We are each on the brink of falling asleep. Not having steady work for a while, our attention is flitting between possibility and cement. We have broken away from the larger group which we had been with earlier, the one that decided to go out on the town. It's Saturday night, and hearing the proposition makes my stomach hungry and my penis sore. There's no way buying drinks is in my game plan. I am a poof of dry dust.

So, we dismiss ourselves, my friend and I, from the group and drive out of that parking lot, where our talented friend has just finished a set of music. It was his CD release, and we were there to support. We drank water and talked about Burning Man, about death, about drugs, about water, about buses and mustaches, about what the world would be like had Tim Burton been born with ovaries. It has been a rough haul for us, but especially him. His mother had just passed away, and he is now living in her house. He has the heart of a mastodon.

We roll into the driveway and execute our plan for the evening. He introduces me to his newest creation, "Pegasus," a nine-feet-tall catapult capable of flinging anything weighing about 25 pounds screaming through the sky. It is October. Shell-split pumpkins litter his rustic yard, like the heads of invading martians, visiting from different planets, trying to get inside the bus. He shows me how to load Pegasus, and tells me to grab a pumpkin from a large box, sitting about ten yards away, so I pick up the one that looks like it's got an eyeball, and it is looking at me, deciding whether or not to show me mercy, and I stare right into it and think, "You asshole, you are powerless, you have no arms, no guts, no opposable thumb, you are fucked beyond any hope even though you think you might have some kind of reign over me, why, just because I don't have a job? Well, I am America, and the future is bright!" So I pick him up, and Pegasus is happy. My friend opens the bag, what I would guess anatomically is Pegasus' uvula. The safety pin goes in. The string is in my hand. He gives me the okay. I count in French. Un... deux... trois...

I pull the string, and the oppressive eyeball pumpkin soars, slices through October, the haunted trees devouring him as he descends, eaten, Pegasus laughing back and forth, and, for now, I am a spectacle no more.