"They're obsessing

     "They're obsessing on what we did," a man in a flak jacket and helmet stood up in his three foot foxhole and said.  He was shot in the chest with a sandbag tank arm.  "That's what he said."  I hadn't gotten a chance to talk to a new acquaintance's "the old man" since I'd left the tavern early.  People were impressed with his grit, casual clothes, sense of humor once he got on the same page in a story.  They also liked the way he and his wife could fall into ignoring each other spells while things mostly work themselves out.  "No need to worry that," was a phrase heard while potatoes were baking in a kitchen where people were re-creating "some Colonial thing or another." It went along with nobody's perfect, but you gotta try.

     "I hate Colonials," Sherry said.  It sounded loud because it was before the din of restaurant.  "Whaddaya mean?" Someone asked.  "MOM! Jeeees.  Speak for yourself." 

     "I am.  And I hate the whole Colonial thing.  Can you imagine spending one half of the day making butter and one half a candle so you can see the butter?" People remembered eat when you can, sleep when you can, poop when you can, and in an uncoordinated but group way started unwrapping butters and passing the bread around the table.  "But they," the man's mouth almost spit out tobacco juice but there wasn't any in there, "They knew how to take a stand." A prospective son-in-law had just bitten into a dinner role and struggled to swallow it and have a conversation.  "Not sure," he swallowed hard and slurped ice water, "Sir," more water, "If I entirely agree with you there on that point." 

     "What point?  I wasn't making a point."  

     Others filed past a buffet set up for people who needed to eat and go.  "When are they going to tell us Donald?" He turned his head and looked at her.  Radiant beauty.  He'd said something like Jesus and her; fish hooks to my roaming brain.  I just can't stop thinking of things I need to do until one of them touches my focus.  He put an arm, hand holding a glass of ice water, around her shoulder.  "Don't stress.  They're not, we're going to tell them.  If that's what we decide.  If that's what we're sure about."  She almost rested her head on his arm but popped it up strong before she sank sleepy.  "I'm sure." 

     Someone tapped on a water glass with a fork.

 "We consider it essential to consult with our allies to ensure shared situational awareness and to agree on our next joint steps," Michal said.

US President Donald Trump said on Friday: "I don't love it. I don't like when that happens. Could be big trouble."

Czech President Petr Pavel on Saturday said Nato should respond to such provocations by shooting down planes.

Pavel, a former chairman of Nato's military committee, said: "Unfortunately, this is a balancing act bordering on the edge of conflict, but one simply cannot retreat in the face of evil."

From an Article on BBC News, Estonia seeks Nato consultation after Russian jets violate airspace

20 hours ago [Sept. 20, 2025]

Jaroslav Lukiv andJoe Inwood

     "Does it sound like the old pine box song?" 

     "Do I really sound like Ronald Reagan sometimes?"  

     "Well, I've not heard your speeches," she yawned, "And so far from home I can't really do a comparison analysis of the two songs."  Bare feet.  Some kind of stretchy soft glitter pants.  "And my shirt, right?!  You gave that one too me, right?!" She asked as the other she went into a camper and rooted around for coffee.  The camper's she had tried to assure us that it'll all be all right. 

     Late night conversation until darkest before sunrise had us talking about that couple we'd seen almost strangle each other a few times.  "Some people love that way." 

     The fire crackled and a chunk of hardwood split.  "Fighting the whole time?!  That'd wear me out." 

     "They swear they love each other and, time and again, they do get through their issues.  Drinking never helps but they know that."  

     "I could write a song about that.  God knows I've got no love life to sing about." 

     "What day is the audition?"  

     "Thursday." 

     "This is Sunday!" 

     "You too better get busy."  The camper she went to bed.  "Maybe I shouldn't do it." 

     "That's your problem?" 

     A long stare into the campfire.  "I don't really have a problem." 

     "But you said you ain't got no music." 

     "I didn't say that.  I's just waitin' to play 'em for you first." 

     "Well, it's getting later and later.  Don't you think you might should play me at least one?" 

     "I'll think about it."  In a little while she got up and got her guitar and a travel bag, "Set this over there," she said as she took a notebook out.  "Whacha got in it?" 

     "Go ahead and look." So I did.  A small pile of dress shoes and silky soft dresses and shirts and a pair of pants.  "You need panty hose?" 

     "Maybe so I can strangle myself."  She tuned and strummed the guitar.  The sounds of the instrument just up close and outside sounded at once casual and amplified by the fire.  "I'm thinking in my head what I should start with," she propped a leg on the camp chair and the guitar on it.  "You already memorized all your songs?" 

     "Mostly," she said as she took an eye glass case with picks and poker chips out of a pocket and decided which one to use. 

    "None of them are political." 

    "The other one's might be." 

     She tuned to her voice until she said, "Close enough," and like a person at a lake, just dove in and started singing.

     It was Tuesday afternoon when Pops quietly stood near a picnic table with something behind his back.  "What is it?" I asked.  He showed a mangled guitar and said, "I can't fix this."  He left it on top of the table.

     "Okay, this one's called something like, 'Sorry I Disturb You,' the singer then stood up and acapella'd.  Someone pointed to the picnic table where people had left offerings.  Unbroken guitars, money for bus fares, bottles of soda and water.  There was also garden vegetables since a truck driving friend had told everyone, There's nothing fresh on the highway. 

     "Nope," Somebody agreed.  "The road goes on forever and the party never ends." 

     "Forever ever?" A lovestruck young man asked his woman.  "Yes! I will.  Love you forever ever."  He tapped the fat envelope of money to get them "all the way to Chicago." 

    "I'll be up there to hear the poets slam.  Maybe I'll see you." 

     "I doubt it.  Big place," the man said. 

     "I'm going up with a few poets.  You might know some of them!" 

     "Not the point."  He twirled the woman's hair until she brushed his hand away.  Then took it and kissed it.  "What's the point?  I mean, what do you mean?" 

     "I mean we gonnah be busy with music stuff." 

     "Yes we are," the woman ducked out of the conversation she was having and affirmed.

     The sound was down but the footages being spliced together into a montage spoke volumes.  Acting silly, the artist deemed it.  People under the pressures of a rapidly corporatizing world and having feelings in regards "the end of the world".  The lever controlling speed sped up some parts of the carry on while I'm gone.  "We had carried on all right." The artist thought through an impact zone of happening that had transpired quickly compared to peoples' recoveries and re-finding God.  "I guess we should have known." 

     "Did anyone tell us or did it just add up into war?" 

     "Probably a little bit of both," a writer home from Overseas said.  The little closet of a room fell silent.  "We certainly knew not friendly when they blew up our barracks in Beirut." 

     "That's what I don't understand," a young man sighed.  "Why didn't we just blow them the fuck away before they sunk our ship?" 

     "It's a little more complicated than that." 

     "Here!  Here it was."  The footage answering a question about costumes.  One, more of a historical item than just any costume.  The debate was and wasn't about whether or not the item was stolen.  "We wouldn't have disappeared into that place if there wasn't rioting in the streets." The artist eye-balled a pottery sculptor from Europe.  "Vhat else?  Vee need homes."  

     "It's not going to work."  The footages were taken on like five different equipments.  "Besides, I can't just make a movie, just like that." The artist pulled the satiny-sounding long coat up over here mussed up dress.  "Put all of it in this bag."  She pulled a cloth grocery sack from a pocket.  "I may know someone who can help." 

He'd backed into

     He'd backed into hanging moss after a rain, but it was darker than dark with no moon up on the hill.  He froze solid as all the fears in the world welled up from his toes, through a constricting chest, and up into a throat wanting to scream.  The baby in a sling around his chest and too much fast food stomach seemed to laugh at him.  His eyes blinked hard.  That made the beard getting longer move slightly.  And that made his wife laugh right out loud.  Sssssshhhh, the man put up his hands and shook them side to side, ten fingers spread wide, warding off.  He breathed hard for a few seconds, then whispered gruffly, "You'll wake her." The mama spit out lemon seeds and said, "Have you slept one time through the whole night in these six weeks?" 

     The man peeked into the space between the sides of the sling.  "That doesn't matter," his eyes narrowed and he pulled the sling apart just a little more.  "Look at her," he said.  "Can't right now.  Should be one or two more puppies in this mama." She rubbed the chest of the pit bull and coo'd, You can do it mama.  That did and didn't seem to matter to the panting dog with eyes looking away and then closing and twitching.  

     "They're scared."  A figure moved up the slight footpath.  Then it became clear that there were followers.  The person in front assured, "They're scared." 

     Another person stepped out from behind a thick barked tree.  "Those pups afraid?" 

     "Not them," the person gave a paper bag with the bottle of alcohol to the other person.  "Apparently, there's some group called The Shantees scaring The Nantzes." 

     "How'd they do it?"  The person asked one of the followers as he opened the whiskey.  "Spook ya?"  He drank a third of the bottle in one long gulp.  And wiped his lips on the back of his hand.  And passed it. 

     "What does it matter?  They got us to abandon position?" 

     "Didn't know there was such.  Sounds serious." The man waited, stiff and ominous, for the bottle to come back to him still mostly full.  The woman lit a cigarette and put it in his weak lips.  Then she took out a folded in half piece of paper from a back pocket of her jeans.  She stuffed it in his front jeans pocket.  "What's that?" He asked as he was sucking in a deep drag of smoke and this set off a coughing fit that would've tore apart an erector set person or building.

     She counted the followers as they hit the leveled out spot on the hill.  Five.  Five more mouths to feed.  The last person was bundled up in a head scarf over a knit cap and had two small puppies in her arms.  Seven, but who's counting?  The woman took a puppy like it was a baby and let it lap her face and neck.  Without turning around she said, "It's the bill for getting the other kid stitches." 

     The man's eyes grew wide and he choked down more drink.  "Are you for real?" He coughed like a motorcycle being kickstarted and spit out a slick spot, phlegm and blood.  "We SACKED 'EM paw."  The man slapped his knee and bent down.  "Sacked 'em huh?  Like knights?" 

     "More like," the kid thought visibly and hard, "Like...VIKINGS!"  The man slapped him on the back.  "ALL RIGHTIE THEN.  A CHIP OFF THE OLD BLOCK.  I'LL DRINK TO THAT!" The kid had been moved closer to the woman getting congratulated and he looked up at her.  "There's a hunk of pepperoni in the tent.  Will you go and get it for us all honey?" The kid moved off to the tent. 

     The woman took the whiskey and pulled a slug and held the bottle up out of the bag a little ways.  "We'll need more'n this to get cozy.". The man fished into the pocket with the bill and took out cash and squinted at the bill saying, Too bad I cain't read and rocked on a foot forward to pitch the bill into the cold firepit.  The woman blocked his throw.  "We need to pay that one," she looked at his face dead on.  "Can't pay 'em all.  And my kid won the fight right?" 

     "Riiiight, but," she curled her words into sounding like she was following his logic but the but hung in the air.  

     The bill drifted to the ground as the man used both arms to try and strangle the woman.  She got her hands under his grip and pushed and pushed against his until he limply let go.  "Let me catch my breath," he wheezed.  The kid handed up the hunk of pepperoni after he broke off a piece and went and sat on a rock.  He pulled a wrapped candy out of his pocket and balanced both on his knees.  He put his hands together and said, Grace, then bit into the meat.  "Where did you get this?" The woman snatched the candy away.  "At the store, duh." He snatched it back from her.  Put it back on his lap.  "Getcher own," he snarled. 

     "How 'bout I make pasta?" The woman in the head scarf pulled an MRE out from her coat pocket.  "I'll eat it," the woman said.

 

     It'd been like five weeks not five days.  Almost everyone had been deeply inspired by the group makeup event where there was singing and praying and planning for a future.  Some of the people from the Country were astonished that people from the City were so downhearted.  A predominant phrase heard in conversations everywhere was you don't get it.  It went with young people and older people accusing of each other they just don't get it!!!!!

  "Get what?" My ever-practical Mom asked.  More frustrating sighs.  "Well, why don't you explain yourselves better?"  One of the Dads, with a fat lip from not backing down on some things, tsk'd, and winced when his lip hurt as he made the face he so often made--like he was shaking his head but only in his lips.  He'd press those together instead of just saying and his nose would twitch and those lips would talk without saying anything.  "It's like he's breakdancing with his mouth," one of the Forest scouts said looking in the binoculars.  "Yeah, but he doesn't really express himself clearly," a daughter said of him.  "But he's warming up to the idea."  

     "We'll put him in this column."

      Possibles. 

     A Native American friend with a deadpan sense of humor annoyed that we hadn't been to the Reservation to see The Drama quipped, "Stop the world, They need a new Great Big White Father."  

     "Why do you think or refer to us all as one person?  Just 'white'?!  

     He humphed.  "That's obvious." 

     "What time is it?" The jackets in the backseat moved and a woman emerged from having the jackets in the night put over her.  My friend yelp-silent-screamed and frantically tried to get the door open.  "Why did you lock me in?  Why did you lock me in?" His hand scrambled all over the door but couldn't find the handle.  "I'm not going to hurt you," the woman said.  My friend looked back at her and said, "That's not what I've heard from hundreds of years of history!!!!"  His hand finally found the handle and he fell out of the car and closed the door and made the call me later sign.

     "Ready?"

     The line of speakers and cords and bags and old coffee cups stacked in a column and shoes and a tennis racket was neatly waiting to be loaded into the car.  Agnes hugged and hugged the two girls.  Pops added the restored tent to the line of items to load up.

     Laughter and squealing-being-chased, smells of food cooking, donated tarp-shade-tents on all sides.  "Looking good baby girl," a woman who never took off her black sweater and black skirt winked and clucked the sound of a gun firing go.  She blew the smoke from her pistolè hand. 

     Everything fit and we fit ourselves in too.  Turned the key and the gas was on EMPTY.  "We'll have to make it to my Dad," I confessed. 

     All three sons and my Dad were sleeping side-by-side like sardines in a can in their tent.  Gatlinburg-- stickers and brochures and a mug and a hat, tee-shirt, and a beach towel all boasting Gatlinburg, Gatlinburg.  I backed out of the tent.  Realizing something, Dad came mussed-up hair and boxer shorts out of the tent.  His Mary medal making the little cling-clang noises we'd always here at the house.  "DAD!"  He yawned and scratched his stomach.  The brothers all in a row poked heads out the tent door.  "DAD!  YOU GUYS HAVE BEEN CHEATING!!!!!" 

     "I don't know what you're talking about."  

     "Did you go to Gatlinburg last night?" 

    "Maybe.  Not sure.  No?" 

    Silence.

     "Throw me a shirt, will you?!" 

     One of the brofhers hucked a Carolina tee-shirt at him.  It hit him in the chest and fell onto his lily white feet in the dirt. 

     "I'm not like you people." He whipped the dirt off the tee-shirt as he scooped it up and put it on. 

    "Us people?" 

    "Yeah.  What do you mean Dad?" 

     "Pioneers.  Or survivors.  Or something." 

     "Does your camp need an extra Dad?" The littlest son asked. 

     "Did you guys eat out last night?"  

     "Steak.  And vegetables, barley sprouts, on a board with on fire sauce to put on the potatoes!" The littlest brother said. 

  "Really?!  Well, I hope you guys saved some leftovers." 

     "Why?" 

     "That's what you'll be eating when Mom finds out about this." 

     "She ate the leftovers!" Shock overtook my face, "Really?"  "Yeah," he nodded slowly.

"As far as they're concerned."

    All the pulling together had my fire for Country rekindled after the hangover went away.  I re-upped on some going Overseas training for people who can't actually use the word journalism.  Even the off, off, off "broadway" headlining journalism types had left. 

    A tiny woman with a big nose squinted at the photographs in the developing film.  "Looks like the remnant," a man said of a lot of us crossing a finish line amidst red flags and MAGA gear.  "What's that mean exactly? MAGA.  Sounds weird." 

     "Take this duct tape off my mouth and I'll tell you." 

     "Six minutes to go, then I will." 

     "That's how the enemy sees us Americans." 

     Rikeareric? 

     "Really.  You're too cute to torture." He ripped the duct tape off and asked if it hurt.  Eyes poured tears, but I calmly said, "Of course NOT."  

    "Like we're a relic, yes," the man sighed and picked up a pointy instrument from a set of tools near the chair I was tied to with an electrical chord as a real friend had been in a Casino money heist.  "We don't seem like a relic to ourselves.  We think we're modern and," he put the pointy instrument down.  "Making progress." 

     "Aren't we?  Jeeeez.  Everyone I know is sacrificing one way or another. 

     "I'll just walk you through what we know they've been doing to us.  You off to the Middle East or..." 

   "Not sure I should tell you." 

     "Well, don't then." He shook his head at the sad routine of meeting new people but not really in any way besides teaching them how awful the world is.  His shoulders slumped as he looked at another photo, "Look at everyone smiling for a split-second." All three of us looked at it.  "What was it about?" The developer asked.  "That one?!  Oh, it'll be funny someday, but most of the people in that one, well, had done crash courses in sobriety and not fighting.  At least not as nastily as we all were!" 

     "That's good," the torture expert said.  "God knows, the rest of the world is doing a good enough job at that."  

     "Did you just compliment them?" 

      "They couldn't hear me, so it doesn't count." 

"That's my thang."

     We were out-of-gas and slow leak tire dying when we pulled over.  Turned out the Convoy to Chattanooga was also more of a whale almost beached and needing to be churned from a cold start too.  We were setting on the side of the highway for three or four days.  Some of the mama's seeing off wound up pulling in behind us.  We just stayed in place, a longer and longer line of well-wishing and support stacked up.

     "My son!!!" A woman exclaimed to a worker at Hardees.  "Y'all want some balloons???"

     "Hell yeah!" 

     She plunked the bag of balloons on the counter next to a sack of plain hamburgers.  "You'n's will have to take 'em to the florist and get them blown up." 

     "And where is that at?" The worker drew a little map.  "We'll get these off the ground and take a pitcher for ya." The worker grinned. 

     Our line just about doubled when a mountain chapter of MADD brought more'n halfa them still drunk some of the girls joining, and married, and otherwise part of our pile of wild things.  Bitten off fingernails, layers of tee-shirts and sweatshirts, boots hanging on side mirrors....the MADD "parents" gave sets of keys to Jeep People who'd been running between mentors and us.  "You gonna need a ride back Mattie?" She left one beer a piece from a tore open twelve pack on the hood of each vehicle with a drunk person in it.  "It'll be piss hot or hotter if they go to drink it.  Here's hopin' they learn about kissing the devil," she pulled the sticker tab off a pineapple juice, and put a hand on her friend's shoulder.  "Let's go.  It'll be time to stir the chili." 

     At the Flower Store one lady sent flowers to a family who'd already lost someone in action.  My friend told, "We've got some too." 

     "Who's your "we" dear?" 

     "My name's Janelle and we're mostly Jewish."  

    The lady bit her lip hard and focused on the single stems in a little cooler with a hum in it's bottom.  "I should get one for each of the Moms.  You think yellow?"  

     While they decided on that I asked if they were hiring.  Without a lot of detail or opinion about the great big picture, the florist hintimated business been slow.  But I'll keep your name and number.

     Each time we went back to the line of cars, there were more.  And the woman with the embroidery hoop had cut her cross-stitch fabric into little squares so people could sew patches.  "How come you like sewing so much?" A tween girl asked as she rolled her finger up in her hair and chewed on a stick of gum.  "Well honey, it's my thang."  The girl watched as the needle deftly formed an edge on her patch.  Mountains and sunshine.  "You want I could sew a heart on there?!" The girl smiled but said, "No thank you.  I'm in love with my Daddy." She helped hold the patch on her chest as the sewing lady pinned it with a safety pin.  "How come you got no fingernails?" She asked a woman propped against the vehicle.  "I gots fingernails hon.  Been thirty-seven pair since I started on this USO tour." The girl asked, "What's a USO? Like a flying saucer?" 

     "Only when we're parachutin' in!" The woman picked one of the nail polishes from a pursebag full of 'em.  "Ever hear a song you like on the radio Shug?" The girl thought about it and slowly nodded.  "Chances are somebody in the USO thought it up and put it to music." 

     "Really?" 

     "Quite the group they are.  My sister and her friends!" The sewing lady reached into a pocket of a different purse and took out a brochure about them.  "Surprised they don't have Bob Hope on there," she said.  "Oh they did in my day.  Oh honey, they did." 

     After the youngest girl had walked off I asked, "So, did it come to blows?" 

      "We kept it above board." 

     "Thought she was gonna get tackled.  That Russian woman who wanted to keep the parachute." 

     "That would've been dicey if she wasn't the Donald's woman." 

     "Oh was she there too?" 

      "Yes.  Not the one who fah-messed up her hips on landing.  That one's gotta rest for a day or two." 

      "I bet." 

     "Fact, maybe I'll go do her nails.  She'll like that.  And can you make a patch with seven parachutes on it?" 

     "Just one?" 

     "For now." 

      "I'll let you in on a little secret," she said almost casually. 

     "Not in the mood." 

     The wood was wet.  The umpteenth tarp, removed in the night for going West.  The campground like "general population" in prison at that point.  I knocked the top of the pile off digging for something dry.  She went to find some sticks.

     The sticks looked like a bouquet promising coffee.  "If I can just..." 

     "And look!  Nature's matchsticks." The little shiny red tips of fragile branches.  "The new, it comes out stronger!" 

     "That's the secret.  I know where they are." 

     "The kindling wood?" 

     A little sigh and touching the bandaid on the still cut part of her broken nose.  "The girls." 

     "What, like an inexhaustable source for their police mishaps?!"   Silence.  "That's what they called it in the end.  A mishap.  And some National Guard people got arrested, house arrest style, for 'sex trafficking'".  

     "It's reedunkulous."  The fire sparked to life.  "I think I still have some filters."  I turned into her coming out of the car's "stash" of pack-rat-gathered necessities.  Tampons and pads and coffee filters and tea bags, gauze and chewing gum.  "Did you see the newspaper actually printed who's gone off to fight?!"  

     "Not sure they should've."  Her unfolding a wallet sized coffee filter.  "Me either.  But, you first." 

     "I just think all the information that people are so careless with, it's endangering people." 

     "Freedom of Press though." 

     "Cha.  One of our most important American things." 

     "Freedoms."  

     "What girls?"  

     "Those two older ladies you were asking about." 

     "Really?  Agnes and Ginger."  The teapot started whistling.  "You do???" 

     "Ah-hah." 

     "Can we go there?"  

     "I can't think of a reason why not," she said after she thought about it.  "A whole bunch of people in the woods over there.  Thinking they're useless for one reason or another." 

     "Oh my God, that's good," the coffee steamed in the morning sunlight.  "Let's bring gifts!" She dumped more sticks near the firepit.  "Got any flour and shugah, shugah?" 

     It was quiet near the bulletin board listing FEES and the unique characteristic of the campground.  And quiet when we parked and went about pulling tent and cookware from the pile of stuff in the backseat.  A gruff-faced older man came over and flicked a tent pole up in the pile of tent and poles on the picnic table.  "It's broken," he said.  She said something in a foreign language to him.  And he asked, "And who's the goya?" 

     "This is Lara.  She's a writer." 

     I drew in a breath.  And felt my face get hot, embarassed these things were said out loud. 

     "POPS!!" A young woman rushed over with dogs on a leash.  The dogs smelled our shoes.  "Is he bothering you?" 

     "No trouble.  Hi.  I'm Lara." 

     "We're going to camp here tonight." 

     "You are?" 

     Nodding my friend said, "And we brought some Hallah." 

     "Well.  Hallah-loo-ya. I saved a bottle of wine from last night's soiree." 

     "WE DON'T DRINK." 

     "OH I SEE, even more for me and ah, POPS." The man was toe-nail clippering the broken tent pole out of it's line of poles.  "He likes to fix things," she said to us.  "Guess you'll have to fix it now, huh Pops?!" 

     "Do they have an extra?" 

     She put her head down and shook it gently.  "We'll find one.  So you can fix it." My friend went to him and patted his forearm.  "What other stuff can you fix?  We probably have more broken stuff in there." She indicated the backseat of my car.  "Well, maybe later we can come back and see.  Okay?" 

     Okays from all of us. 

     

     

          (i)Put a little smile on yer pickin' when you don't know what to do; put a little smile on yer pickin', it'll help you see it through; put a little smile on yer pickin' 'cuz that's just what we do; put a little smile....(i).  

     The fire crackled and burned steady smooth.  Two men and a woman passed a notebook back and forth in a fierce competition over advertising slogans.  And a songwriter-of-old was showing a young girl the difference between types of guitars and other stringed instruments.  He was as comfortable making up songs and tunes as some people are sitting on the sofa watching TV.  The young woman smiled.  "Now I hear it," some of the sound differences were subtle. 

     The man's fingertips, bandaged, strummed first then plucked.  His voice found the key in a little hum, then he added strength to the notes of the lyrics.  The young woman was jotting down ideas for (i)storied songs(i) of her own. 

     "I sure am mighty glad we moved to T'see Mr. Bimbley."  Wiley Piles was sitting on his hands and lifting a half a beer to his mouth by sticking his tongue through the pop tab.  The neck of his tee-shirt, (i)Don't Mess With Texas(i), was soaked.  "So am I sis, so am I." 

     "You should see how those Republican men treat their women." Mr. Bimbley grunted the can back onto a boulder.  "I've heard.  They make them do all the work." 

     "That's what you heard?"  

     "Somethin' like that.  Will you light me a cee-gar?"  She fished the car keys out of his jeans pocket and went towards the car.

     

     

     The portable crane/lift was a specialty equipment item used for those big signs along the highway.  We didn't know this at first.  What we knew was what we saw.  Beautiful women in what looked like cages hanging in the air.  Neked.  A very married man said.  His ability to blush had been lost somewhere in thirty-plus years of fighting evil.  Damn, a younger guy's eyes followed the beaner'd rope and his eyes lifted from digipad device, up and up, to the bathing beauties!  A middle aged bachelor whistled quietly.  "Looks like we've got our work cut out for us!" 

     "Where'd they get the cages?" The non-blusher stood at least two foot taller than the woman who'd come out of the restaurant.  She was still fumbling with possible put them somewheres pockets looking for a smoke.  "I heard an onusual noise so I came out here."  An older model but in pristine restored condition pick up truck pulled up and two women jumped out leaving the doors wide open.  "WHADDAYA NEED??????"  

     The man looked over his shoulder at the mounding smoke piling around the equipment truck of some Volunteer Fire Department.  "Find out what's on fire!" He whistled by sticking fingers in his mouth and shrilling a shofar blast.  People attached to a rope with carribiners made way over.  "They're just these old underground showers." The woman had been handed a lit cigarette.  "Prolly put down there in an old semi-truck." One woman grabbed a reporter's notebook and jotted down squiggly marks.  Then shoved it back at the young person.  "What's that say?" 

     "It's SHORTHAND.  DON'T THEY TEACH YOU PEOPLE ANYTHING AT YOUR FANCY SCHOOLS?" 

     "LYDIA!" The man pushed into her and drove her backwards.  Stared directly into her eyes.  "KEEP LOOKING at me." 

     The motorbike had rolled up behind us.  Without the motor running the man rolled it forth into the back of my legs.  Knees buckled, a turn around, "WHAT THE FUCK????" The Lonely Bear held up one hand in a wave.  The notebook was plucked from my hands.  "WHAT THE FUCK????"  It was Lydia.  "I'll take notes! You go get you know who!"  She turned to the Lonely Bear.  "How'd y'all get here so fast in this fog?" 

     The Lonely Bear took a síp of what a camp mom called Mountain Piss Water.  "Is there an all to me?" She rolled her eyes.  A line of seriously in need of some repair cars was rolling into the parking lot.  "There's no fog on the highway," Lonely Bear revealed.  "There isn't?"  

     "No ma'more than usual in the very lowest spots."  Men's voices not knowing where the girls were and cussing cellphones were getting out of the cars.  "GO!!!!" 

     On the way to my car a hideous voice, steady-frantic-sounding over some kind of speaker laughed and howled halloweeny and said, "YOU BETTAH FIX US UP GOOD OR YOU CAN KISS THE GIRLS GOOD-BYE." The crane/lift made a creaking, groaning noise and swung.  Like it was lowering, but then jerked up.  Some of the girls fell to knees.  A black plastic garbage bag was pitched out of an unseen area on the now-platform.  A gun was seen pointing at it.  The creepy voice hollered in the speaker, "Shoes.  Now put them on and dance."  The laughing and howling turned to music.

     In second gear up the nearly dark mountain-side highway.  Up and around, gravity at night must be the same in the dark as in daylight, I thought of seeing the road in the happy sunshine daytime, like a matterhorn rollercoaster track hugging tiny people to the neck and shoulders of a giant yeti.  I knew who she wanted me to inform.  And I went directly there but there was no vehicle in the carport.  And most of the stuff usually on board shelves resting on cinderblocks was gone.  A wad of straps was messily out of a bucket laying on its side.  I knew I needed to get to someone I knew in Tennessee.  Fuck the fighting between sports fans.

     Past what seemed like a mile of steaming mulch and hulking logging equipment.  Through backcountry--part Forest, part crags with housing.  Cut-through after cut-through: north and south to go east and west.  The stars above more than all the creeps in the world.  Finally fish-tailed onto the boundary's gravel.  And steamed towards my Ranger's last known campfire site.

     Red plastic cups were all over the ground.  Slick spots of puke.  A duffel bag slow-burning in the firepit.  A small and weak voice called out, "I'm over here.  I am.  I'm here."  Wimpering.  "Oh! Oh my God." I knelt into the man duct-taped and roped to a metal folding chair.  "Ooooww.  Good to see you too.  Well, sort of see you.  They just left.  These'll be swollen shut real soon.  Got yer knife?" 

     "Oh, shit, did I hurt you?" 

     "Where's your knife.  I need you to get it and cut me free." 

     The serated blade frayed the ropes into a jagged release.  He ripped the duct-tape from his skin.  "Go get in the car." 

     A woman in dark clothing stepped in front of me as I turned toward the car.  "Did you do this???" Her low smoky voice desperate to accuse.  The Ranger found his pile of clothing.  "They stole my fucking watch!" He said as he held his pants and shirt in front of his underwear only junk.  "She's not the perpetrator," he told the woman as he pushed my shoulder to keep going to the car.  "Can I ride with you?" Neither of us answered.  My friend leaned on my shoulder to get a booted foot back into his pants.  She reached for my keys.  "Don't fucking touch me," I swerved away and the Ranger's foot stuck in a pantleg tripped him into me and I fell too.  He put a rest hand on my arm.  "We don't know who you are," he said matter-of-factly as he got a second leg back in his pants.  Tapped my arm twice, UP.  He was still buttoning his shirt as I held the flashlight so he could check credentials.  Winced as he tucked in the tail of his shirt but said, "LET'S GO!!!!!" Both he and she crashed into each other trying to get into the front seat.  "Ow." He opened the door and she squeezed herself into the back.  He looked around and decided, "The van took them that way." 

     "You don't have your glasses on!"  

     "I know it did.  I heard it."  He asked for water.  And proceeded to scrape his contact lenses out.  "Go!" He barked when the first one was out.  "Okay, okay." Tires spinning briefly in oozy keg's-been-here mud before I edged the fronts onto something dry and rocked it, jolting into grip and go.  He fished eyeglasses out of his lower pant leg's inner pocket.  "All these TV people and Rock Stars around had me," he reached over and pulled the brights into on.  "THERE!"  There was a Hawaiin shirt in the gravel road.  "They'll have left clues." 

     "Clues?!?" 

     I braked hard and put it in PARK.  Took the keys out of the ignition.  "What are you..." I slammed the door behind me getting out. 

    "You freakin'?"  He was beside me in twelve paces.  

     "Kinda.  But not really.  Listen." He cupped an ear then rose his hand into "Moose Ears, your little brother taught me that move." 

     "No, listen," I tried to gulp away dry mouth and cacked a little cough.  "I came to find you beca, cough, because there's a majorly weird situation going on in Carolina." 

    "Right now?" He cocked his head. 

     "Cha." 

     "Let me get you your water." He did and half-joked, "My contact might be in there." 

     

 

There were some.

     It had already been that night.  That night when we'd passed around the keepers.  Everyone participating had signed up for no sex "and no kissing," a woman with asthma made worse by low key fireworks and campfires of "wish sticks" and her eyes on one man since childhood said and blamed her watery browns on the air pollutants. 

     Someone handed back a copy of Animal Dreams.  "This was new.". The copy looked like the Lonely Bear's jeans that hadn't come off, not even once, to be laundered.  "Is he just into not bathing?" More than one girl had asked.  "The PR says, 'He didn't want to take a single quarter from the Forest Worker Fund.'"  A tech-know-how but not wanting to become a machine part of Le Machine grinding us up, he'd ridden a motorbike on the thinning and widening lines between fact and fiction since he'd come to the mountains and held the line of neutrality.  "New word for us hoss," other men had held the lines of sides.  There hadn't been a topic that hadn't come up.

  "THERE'S A WAR ON!!!!" The youngest of potential new bi-plane operators cupped his mouth and shouted like a newsie.  "Yah, on my sobriety."  A couple sat upright in the backseat of a convertible antique car.  The young man rubbing his temples and the young woman rubbing her neck.  "We've got to get back to Etowah."  

     "WHOSE DRIVING?  I'LL DO IT!" More still-a-boy pulled his goggle glasses down and adjusted his ascot.  "You're such a whore," a tall, tall guy in a sweater and shirt, tight pants, and black leather gloves looked down at the young woman and said.  "Because I picked up a sack of airmail?"  She waved him away like he was a burning piece of toast smell.  He put his hands on his hips and told a barely awake campsite, "It's been real and it's been fun, but it ain't been real fun."  

     A tent door was violently kicked then shaken open from inside.  "FUCK OFF MATE." 

     "Why's that?" 

     "Because I fucking said so."  There was a quiet like in a group dinner conversation.  Then, "All right, ALL RIGHT, I will.  Don't you dare call me mate, jerk."  He took off one glove and smacked it against the open palm of the other.  "Knock it off guys.  Not us too." 

     For three or four days some of us had been arguing whether or not cold instant coffee even has caffeine.  The arguing would reach an impasse authorative.  None of us knew for sure.  Like so much of what was going on.  We were discovering the truth as it unfolded.

     "Saved me from a deep dark," the subtle, almost normally non-verbal, young woman holding his hand rubbed the back of his hand with her other hand.  He'd practically dragged her through the woods, holding hands, but him hurrying.  He was a little out of breath.  "All the equipment's gone!!!!" 

     "So are the owners of that equipment," the girl with the broken nose said.  It took about twenty seconds for that to set in.  Then someone asked, "So, that's it?!  They just leave like that?" 

  "The way they came." 

  Someone slammed the frying pan on the grate over smoldering coals.  

  "Not all of us left," people turned to the voice.  The quiet girl dropped the hand and went to the woman whose hair was bent like she'd slept leaning against a bookshelf.  "Babies???" The quiet girl signed in her way and asked.  "Though my husband went with them this time."  She held up a skeleton key and told, "One came last night." The guy walked forward and took quiet girl's hand again, and the key.  "Is the mother with the baby?"  The woman nodded sleepily.  "We'll go check on them!" 

  "Where's the coffee?" 

  "We're working on that.  Here," someone cleared textbooks and stories off a picnic bench, "Sit."  She sat.  The girl with the broken nose made cup after cup of coffee but didn't give her one.  She put some of the textbooks onto the table and made a pillow.  Fell asleep.  "She's gonna wake up with the other side of her hair bent." Someone noted.  Someone else went into a tent and found a pillow for her. 

  Camp was quiet all through late morning.  Then came a man with a necktie as a belt on suit pants several sizes too big for him.  His lips stuck out plump of his beard.  And he had knots and knots of garlic on a one-by-three.  "Sort of a strange flag," someone said to him.  "Stranger flags have been seen in these parts," he said.  "Let's start over," someone else said.  "Whacha doin' wich yer garlic?" 

  Each knot had been knotted on a night spent frozen in fear that an army of neo-nazi-types was going to break out of their barracks and hunt him.  "Are you serious?" 

  "How dare you talk about our army that way!" A woman with dirty-faced children on her legs raised a fist more gnarly than the knots of garlic.  The man had beard hair on the tops of his bare feet.  And he put the stick of garlic down against a tree.  "They're not you."  He sighed.  "Not any nation's." 

  "We'll find out if you're lying Mister.  You don't look very legitimate to me." 

  The man wrung his hands.  "I was more so before I got robbed." 

  "You got robbed?!"

  "Yer kind just went back over seas." 

  "My kind doesn't war." 

  "You're a Christian?" 

  "Not exactly but I believe that Jesus was the Messiah." 

  "You lying."  One of the kids knocked over the garlic when his mama said that.  "LIARS GO TO HELL."  The boy set his mouth hard.  "Yayes they do," the man put a hand on the kid's shoulder and bent to pick up his garlic.  "Dangerous times," he said.  "Please.  I need garlic," the girl with the broken nose dug into her sleeve and fished out some bills.  "And," she looked at the ground and tears welled in her eyes, "Would you like a cup of coffee?" 

  "Real coffee in the middle of nowhere?!  Now that's a miracle." 

     While the Forest had turned icey cold in terms of welcoming visitors over "lumber", and the Service had been slashed in terms of manpower, a certain group of "haters" and "militia" had managed to secretly overwhelm a couple workers and briefly occupy a government building.  Like the swarm of "fans" that had run some of us up a train power station where one of us got electrocuted, it was off-shoots to a "mainstream" holding the nation together that kept getting the better of us and this tipping the scales on all of us having a foothold in general sanity.  

     "THOSE MOTHERFUCKERS!" A militant-looking young man jumped out of a 4x4 and threw a fit about his colleagues.  The driver stayed in the vehicle watching the monitors--scopes and go-pro's which everyone was calling kamkams.  "WHAT'D THEY DO THIS TIME?!?" He yelled at the older more stately-uniformeds.  "I'd be careful son," one of them calmly said.  "It's pretty serious to say you know these types of criminals." 

  "Criminals huh?" The younger man wiped sweaty hands on his thighs.  "Guess you would know."  One of the authorities rapped a thickly ringed hand on the blueprints and maps on top of one of their vehicles.  The older men looked at the hand as the man explained, "We've got a plan." The younger man looked at the barracks and blinked sweat away from stinging his eyes.  He looked back at the older men.  "Anyone hurt anyone?"  The man who'd said plan sighed deeply.  "It's pretty routine here.  Why don't you get along?" 

  "Because I care."  Only one official in a hat stiff enough to still a tornado raised his eyebrows.  "That's a new one." The rings made a tapping sound on the blueprint.  A finger pointed out a shade-side window opening big enough for a small man to get through.  "I'm a small man," the younger man said.  He bellied up to the vehicle-desk.  The plan was to get in and somehow lock them into a part of the building.  "That would be good," the younger man said, "But look where they are."  The younger man went to the driver who handed him a laptop with the monitor views like playing card size.  "Really?" The man with the plan asked.  The laptop was placed on top of the blueprint by the older man.  And they all looked at it together.

     It was a sliver of a moon dark where just shapes conjoined make up reality beyond lumens.  Nobody was sleeping.  The young man had gone over things with a different group of authorities.  The dark vehicle pulled forward almost silently.  Some people pulled out their guns and pointed in the direction of it.  From near it came a voice, "Honey, what are you doing here?" 

     "Me?!?"  The young man motioned for people to put their weapons away.  "You think you can just walk away from our campsite and nobody's gonna give a shit??!" Her headlamp put his somewhat pale face in a spotlight. 

     "Oh yeah, we were camping," the young man explained from the stage.  He suddenly looked like a child who'd eaten all the cookies in a cookie jar and a transformer, the way the headlamp was putting shadows above his features in the light.  "They might need my help since 

     "Since you can't keep yourself out of the most dangerous situations in the world????" She looked him up and down with the headlamp.  He just looked like a small man.  Then the headlamp turned and bounced slightly as she told service Overseas, holding riots from spreading, going between groups with missiles and serving sandwiches, that's what he told me he did, just happening to, the headlamp fired back at him, KEEP THE PEACE AT LEAVENWORTH.  Someone made a low Oooooooo noise.  "And now this." She ripped the headlamp off and pointed it at the vehicle door.  "Have you eaten anything? I brought your cooler.  I think your cheese sandwiches are in there." 

     We were sort of on our own then.  Our generation.  Starkly.  Astoundingly.

  "You DID IT!!!!!"  WE were clapping wildly for a person who'd fully raised a leg to beat shuffle-foot.  Some of us busted into tears.  Some part of each of us on the same journey.  Working our whole lives, working for our lives, some of the rollercoaster ride knocking the wind out of us, but choosing TO LIVE.  While a local Mom not remembering everything anymore using the "coping tools".  "Not my bestest day," she smiled and told.  "But you didn't burn the house down," the Helper patted her shoulder.  "It was great, you called us!" 

     "And I put my own diaper on," she winked and covered a giggle.  "We just call those underwear," a competitive Helper said and patted her own padded behind.  They explained their idea of being two competitive Helpers.  "Keeps them all on their toes somehow." 

     "Us too," the other Helper confessed.  "Life around here can get dreary.  Just the slightest tension makes the days more challenging." 

  "Mother!" A son stopped making way to car from grocery store.  "How's your day?" The lady smiled bigger.  "It's really great now.  But who are you?" The man's shoulders visibly slouched.  "Just kidding dear," the mother covered another giggle.  The man asked if he forgot to pay a bill.  "Not that I know of, but, you know..." 

     "How about lunch?!" 

     "We can't afford it," the Helper said.  "And, your mom called us to hang out today.  So that's what we're doing." 

     "Oh, I see."  The parking lot filled with people running errands on lunch.  There was the easy quiet in the conversation that was people past hotblood phase of life.  "Maybe I could go back inside and get us all lunch!" The man stood up straight and almost pointed a finger in the air with idea.  "That would be lovely." The mom said.  

 

The Mystery of The Woolen Sock

     "Alpaca actually," the scientist who'd examined the material with the blood on it corrected.  "Right, alpaca." 

     "Why was it a mystery?"  

     "Did they kill it and eat it?" 

     "The sock, no." The woman was proudly wearing a company logo on her shirt.  "I'd been unable to pick up a pen since finishing my thesis.  But then this happened." She fished out photographs of scuff marks in dirt, looking over the edge of a steep embankment, and what looked like a clump of fur with blood on it.

 

"She's both!!"

    I'd gone with Rorie and her mom to get to my parents at a different campground.  My mom was still suffering from a mysterious illness but a lot of people were helping her at least (i)feel better(i).

     Maybe two miles from where we were we were halted.  "A checkpoint?" 

     "I've heard about those." 

     "This one's got rubber bullets," the strikingly hansome but slimed with cammo makeup man palmed the firearm.  Even pretended to fire it at a "runner" and blew away the smoke.  Then he looked at us very seriously and said, "So much for the smoking gun." 

     "You know, you look a little looney acting that way," Rorie's mom said.  "Maybe so, but," he leaned in close, "I need the work.  Now hand over your passports." 

     "Yeah, we're not doing that," Rorie said. 

     "Are we supposed to?" I asked.  The man swung the gun around on his finger.  "Stop that," Rorie's mom said.  "I dunno.  Let me check the clipboard." He holstered the gun and turned his whole belt around to produce the clipboard.  "Covering my butt," he said. 

     Rorie's mom fished out a neat leather pouch of cigarettes and lighter.  We all lit up.  "Says here," the man stalled to gather his game show character-voice and said again, "Says here, 

     "Yes Andy?" 

     "Do I sound like I'm from Mayberry?" 

     "A little." She blew the cigarette smoke at the back of the clipboard.  Like cloud hitting mountain it only feigned a linger and curled away.  "What's your crystal ball tell you?" Rorie asked. 

     "You're both." Rorie's eyebrows went up and down disguising her reaction which her mom was watching in the rearview mirror.  The man said, "Print and Visual.  We're calling that bi-medial."  He winked a flirt.  "And you're Lara, aren't you?" He'd reached his hand in through the window and made the butthole talk and point.  "Why do you have a butthole on your hand?" He withdrew it.  Put his face inside instead.  "Because I can be a reeeaaallll butthole." 

     He stood up tall and called out, "They're IN." 

     "Did you sign us up for this?" Rorie shoved her mom's shoulder.  "Figured it wouldn't hurt." 

     Rorie and I looked at each other as both our doors were opened from the outside.  "Have fun," Rorie's mom said. 

     The checkpoint-keeper asked, "Would you like to be tortured or experience being in a foxhole first?" 

     "You can't really train for that."  

     "Tell them that!" 

     In a little field a group of people in a sundry of sports equipment were making a racket with pots and pans.  "We gave all the cups to the guys and girl practicing to be gunners." A girl in sweat pants and a tank top reported.  "It looks pretty silly from over here, but with a helmet and vest on, it sounds similar to being shot at!!" 

     

      "She might be trying to doh-mess-tick-ate you," the hairy man hissed the messs part of the word.  He ground the mud more into the bottom of his boot instead of stomping it off.  "I'll take my chances.  She won't be able to," the one with the trimmed beard growled.  "Guess I'll be goin' then." 

     "Ayup." 

     Winter was coming on harder than summer had ended.  The soft glows of leaves yellowing while basking in sunlight were turning trees into silouhetted things.  Like clouds, trees could be given attributes.  (i)Bent Old Fool(i) a local practiced on the trees.  "I won't ever remember all that other stuff about (i)likes(i) and (i)ases(i)," she said.  "But letting Nature show me.  What it is," her voice dropped into reverence.  "I can do that." 

     "You're a real good storyteller too!  Don't forget." 

     "I will try.  You know I'd forget my head if it wasn't attached." 

     "Don't run yourself down.  We've all turned a corner." 

     "Okay," she gave me a gentle smile and picked up her walking stick and made way back to the little gravel road. 

     We had.  Turned a corner.  And it had not been easy.  But we'd gotten children back in school and caught up with shoes on their feet.  We'd matched social work people with "shut ins" and people so "unkempt" the State "might have to step in and relieve you of the burdens you face." We'd had mini-festivals and crafted ourselves silly to help staple community people pay back taxes.  We'd crossed unbearably difficult chasms to talk to one another about "problems" and "issues".  We'd also gotten a next generation war-ready.  There was no doubt that we'd accomplished some stuff.  "Where do we go from here?" Some child doctors from other countries asked a leader leaving the Forest one afternoon.  The question lingered for many of us hanger-oners too.

     "Mr. M., are you angry?" 

     After a grunt and a sigh the man said, "This implies that you had sex with my daughter." 

     The younger man turned purple-reddish in the face.  "And while I understand that as a man, we are talking about (i)my daughter(i)." The younger man's knees buckled then and he stooped into the nearest log, planted his butt, and stared into the air in front of him.  The older man stomped his foot like a charging bull but really it had fallen asleep.

     While the Bimbleys were reconnecting after weeks of extra-famial (i)breakout a little(i), another car drove up.  "They're not gonna just leave us here!"  The normally calm and cool, serious journalist, young woman slammed the door.  "Whaddaya mean?  I thought everything was all set!" 

     "Shit." 

     It wasn't two minutes of smoking the ashtray butts and slamming coffee before they drove up. 

     "Ready?"  A tall woman in a heavy longcoat rolled down the window and asked. She had a darkness about her, not sinister herself, you could tell, but like she was being pressed down on with something dark. 

     "No.  Mom.  I am not."  

     The woman rolled the window up again. 

     "What are we gonna do?  We can't be without you Rorie." 

     "You'll do fine." 

     "NO.  WE WON'T." I slammed a frying pan heating up cooking oil down on a rock almost in the fire.  The splattering oil snapped in the flames and singed my sweater.  Rorie didn't say anything like (i)look what you did stupid(i).  I used the spatula to smear the rest of the oil in the pan.  (i)Just start over(i) the Pastor's voice was in my head from dozens of times, me calm and cool to pitching a fit in thirty seconds.  "What's the good news?" 

     She took a hand out of her jacket pocket.  "He wants us to work it out!"  The little diamond caught the sun and sparkled like Rorie's sudden smile.  "Maybe almost drowning was the clincher." My mind drifted back to that terrifying day.  "But that was by no means on purpose," she added.  All of us hyper-aware that the rocky roads of war had us in carefully guarded territory, mentally well OR....

     

     The muscled man hit his head on a tree branch, startled, as a woman got out of a half re-done Mexican bad ass style towncar, and hollered "Wiley Piles, where are yoooooou?" 

     "Sis!  How'd ya find me?!" 

     "You left a trail of chopped down trees and genuine heartbreak thirty miles long, so, it weren't hard."  She looked down at her feet.  A mismatched set of boots.  "Dammit!  I hate it when I do that."  

     "Could be worse, you could have one sneaker and one boot.  Or a sneaker and a heel.  You'd be like," he threw down the firewood sticks and started limping around and smoking a cigarette all shik.  "Dammit, I hate it when I do that," he mocked.  

     "Well, hon, I see you haven't changed a bit." 

     "I have.  I have." He huffed and started picking up the pieces of firewood.  "Fact, you wouldn't even know me now.  Except you knew where to find me.  Dad's PI's?" 

     "What the, nooooo, there's nobody working for Dad." 

     "Oh sure.  Clearly his brainwashing has gotten to you Sis." 

     "Can I say something here?"  The girl with the broken nose asked.  No answer.  "The grits are done and you're welcome to join me."  Both people flocked to the firepit.

     Not sure you can imagine not being able to help each other.  Surely not if you never had help, or needed (i)anything(i).  There was no cash flow for a time.  And the volunteers wore themselves out, stress and malnutrition.  Mostly younger people with no foothold in terms of owning anything.  But also, in truth, career service people of all ages. 

     While America was in the 1990's things got restructured from what they had been for a long time.  And part of that restructuring prevented America from being able to save itself as the America we were.

  "Why are you crying?" The calloused hand rested on the table. 

  "It's just sad.  So sad." 

  "Well, you have to stop.  Stop crying." 

  The order worked until dinner was over and people broke into couples and quiet evening time.  It was foolish to cry.  Didn't help anything.  And it went against Victory.  It was showing weakness.  And revealing vulnerable.  Better to pretend strong and invulnerable.  (i)Pretend(i).  Pretend the non-food fills you up.  Pretend we're not in a surveillenc state.  Pretend that no matter the mess we've become, we're winning!  But who are we beating?  What, exactly, are we winning? 

  I could not, for the life of me, figure out the answers.  Sometimes that drove me to drink hard and fall down stupid.  But little by little I came to let go of a drive to win it all and came to embrace small victories as the precious stuff.  It was then that I found something to write about.

     

Sanity and survival became the cause.

  Once we put sanity and survival as the main cause we had purpose.  It didn't matter as much why our sanity and survival had gotten ruined in the first place.  And bringing it all around to that primary issue allowed space for all kinds of other issues to devolve before the masters.  Even the nagging opinions of others often melted away as people focused.  It wasn't losing self or self's likes and dislikes, but it was a way to break through zombie and the death clutches of opposition.  It also proved that character and personality is an important part of being human.  It was a way of fighting the communism of war and the factory-production of good little citizens.  People were claiming their Americanism.

     We were all in girls' clothing when some of the parents came looking for us.  A guy with arms the size of my thighs which everyone called cannons had come to our camp lovestruck but at a loss.  "What's yer problem hoss?" Another guy finally peeled himself away from his girlfriend and dislodged himself from their tent.

     "It's like I can't," he flapped the air with his hands trying to express something, "Can't...." 

     "WHAT?!? Get it up?" 

     "YEAH." The guy let his hands fall limp on his lap.  "Like all my brains that make it work shook loose or something." 

     "Just pop a couple of these!" The other guy fished blue pills out of his jeans pocket and carefully counted out three.  He took the plastic off his cigarette pack and put the pills in there and tossed it at the guy.  Guy caught it and held it up like it was an X-ray.  He was looking at them when the girl with the broken nose emerged from the bushes and rushed over.  "YOU DON'T NEED THOSE MISTER!  NO MATTER WHAT THEY ARE!!" 

     "Their gonna give me a hard-on apparently.  And I think I DO need them."  

     "Give them back.  And let's figure out what's really going on." 

  "Okay."  He stood and gave the pills back to the shirtless man.  "I'll talk, but if that don't work, I want the magic bullet."  The other man grumbled and went back in the tent. 

     "Can I touch them?" 

     "My nuts?" 

     "Your legendary ARMS!" 

     "I GUESS SO.  But you should know," 

     "Yes?" She reached up and her tiny fingers poked at the muscle.

    "I think I found my one." 

    "Your one?" 

    "My true love." 

     "Is this when your other problem started?" 

     "Maybe, but

     She had taken his hand in her own hands and was turning it over and scrutinizing it.  "But?" 

     "That doesn't mean she's NOT!  WHAT ARE YOU DOING????"  He snatched his hand away. 

    "Is that gunpowder?" 

     He tucked his hands into his armpits in crossing his arms.  "Maybe."

     "Did you harm those girls you won in that bet?"  She'd caught his darting eyes and wouldn't let go.  He stared back at her.  And finally said, "It's not like that."  

     "Want some grits?  I was just about to make some."  She turned towards the firepit.  He dropped his hands and tall-leggedly beat her to it.  "Want me to get some more wood?" 

     "That'd be very nice of you."  He turned to look for a stack of wood.  "My father won those girls fair and square.  Because," he kept looking for a stack of wood, "Because, your government couldn't figure out how not to waste talent!"  He started towards the Forest floor.

  

 About the best we could do was warn others, hey, cool it on cause!  And take the flak for being "sell outs".  This after a girl got her nose broken defending the right to have generic cause.  Whatever else had been communicated, the message of no violence was no match for peoples' pent up passions.  And it was proving futile to "have boundaries".  People with "ins" at city media places and academic institutions scurried to get the word out.  Something about civility does not "resonate" with these people.  They are "acting out" on their grievances. 

  "I wonder if it's the video games?"  A woman in a Jesus Loves You sweatshirt bloodied by the broken nose asked out loud.

 

      For a while the stories to be written did and didn't seem autobiogaphical.  Afterall, sometimes all of us girls amounted to one generic female.  And during war times it wasn't safe to tell the stories with any sense of present.  Then too, there were stories better left untold because of the choice of privacy.  

     And, an incredible feeling of inadequecy (sp?).  Between not having "mastered the craft" and some sort of unworthiness in not amounting to the same, there were crippling moments of (i)can't write it(i).

     "Well, they didn't kill each other."  A cooking pot was slowly moved back and forth over the coals.  "What was it like?" 

     "I've not got a metaphor." 

     "Did either of them seem, I don't know, angry?" 

     "It was late midmorning when your man walked up the road but on the edge, in the shadows." 

     "Where was my Dad?" 

     "He'd been folding and unfolding a personal size pizza box and kind of overseeing the morning fire which we kept small because nobody caught a fish.  Though, you know us homebodies, the routine matters more than actually eating sometimes." 

     "Until it doesn't because of work." 

     "Your man only glanced at the fire before asking rather dry-mouthed and stiff-voiced, 'Mr. M., Can I speak with you privately?' 

     "Your Dad carefully put the pizza box in his inside pocket." 

     "My note.  Near his heart." 

     "And he said, 'Alright, okay.'  But then he walked about ten feet away." 

     "What did you do?" 

     "I asked right out loud if I should leave." 

     The edges of the beans started to bubble crispy.  "Your Dad said (i)No(i), and your man said, (i)Yes, leave(i).  To which your Dad tapped on the outside of the pocket and gave an overriding (i)No(i)." 

     "Men." Then a sigh. 

     "Then your Dad rolled up the shirt sleeves that were sticking out of his coat.  And your man asked, 'Mr. M., are you angry?'  He didn't answer at first.  He took a rolled up crossword puzzle out of his back pocket and a pencil from another pocket and wrote something." 

     She rested the cooking beans on the matada.  And unfolded the note.

     (i)I don't want to find it in a trash bag.(i) 

     She passed the note to me as tears fell from her eyes and she didn't wipe them away.

     There had been all sorts of stuff found in the trashbags of what went through the campground as our generation (i)taking a stand(i).  Anything with what had been human life was taken to a special chapel.  There people had been manning a vigil.  And there, too, some different denominations of religion's group representatives were holding meetings in the parking lot to discuss resources and programs.  Late into the night in her travels my own mother stayed at the chapel praying the Rosary.  Her list of intentions and people to pray for had grown to twice its original size on the visit.

     

      We came to know their routines on their "farms" on our public lands.  So we learned their sky patrol.  And this we carefully and incrementally led just a little bit farther, a little bit farther over the boundary lines.  Some days were painfully slow in progress.  Hours and hours spent in the same position.  Hours and hours in the mountain garden spot, mirroring their positions.  Hand-drawn maps were coming in from all sides.  All sides of where we hated to admit it, but they'd trapped us.

     "Our commanders need our support right now, so you can check the attitude at the door, or you can fend for yourself." A military mom was brave in mom-ing a camp of respiters and on-holds for active duty.  Sometimes us "communicators" chose to stay so we could all sleep at the same time, and sometimes we kept on the trek to a signal post.  There was truth except in scramble.

      Right away as the fighting intensified the support tendrils of the octopus we had become proved capable of extremes.  Soaring heights of had helped, even just a little bit to deep, dark recesses where thoughts of suicide are not even necessary--you can feel like the walking dead.  It's out beyond ethics at that point because the group (i.e, nation) is calling the shots and the truths don't match up to Victory toasts and well-wishes from "home".

     "I spit at him for you," the girlish woman hissed.  She'd stopped short of walking up on the conversation.  The well kept Officer was surpressing information about just how many had been raped.  Behind the tall bush the girlish woman rubbed her abdomen and said in thickly accented English, "I knew you Americans would find them out the same thing like ours." 

     "We've got people that made it stop.  And they will pay the cost." 

     "Abortions?" 

     "Apparently it's a choice."

     Back at home camp one of our besties had not been raped but misjudged her "moon cycle" and was miserably pregnant.  Our box of food from a weekly trek to a nearby village had very little in it to help the poor woman.  Some "warming pills" and a new fangled disposable breast pump.  "What should I do with these?" The father held up the manna from heaven and asked.  "Okay, okay, I started her own box of goodies!" Our girl-muscle said without looking up from an anatomy book.  "Oh, she gets the brownies I see!" The man peeked through the things in her box.  "Get yer socks up here with ours," the expecting mama indicated the pole of roasting over the fire socks. 

     "And swap your belt for one that fits better.  These come from friends living farther up the mountain."

Public Sentiment

      I think you want it to turn, but not turn against anyone.

     Some people pretend they can control a tsunami of passion and action.  Then it flattens us and we call it hate.  It's a difficult time to stand against "enemy" without being strong as one nation.  So that's the challenge.  Somehow co-exist as fellow Americans.

     Politics forces choice; and funnels hatreds of other and different.

     Soledad O'Brien was one of the first of us to "get it".  A raging debate was happening over "objectivity" in journalism.  Out past (i)is it dead?(i) there was the complicated matter of influence over even objective truth.  And sensationalism as influence.  Soledad dropped into the ocean of "news" and somehow stayed plumb.

The flipside of chanting USA, USA

     What we'd accomplished at St. Patrick's then worked in other modalities.  An example was child-centered support teams.  They divided each grade into two classes.  This after realizing there were relative few students engaging.  Many in my age group had come aboard as "immigrants" especially after the political cycles of the early 1970s.  It was awkward for everyone when such "issues" as having been raised a communist revealed themselves.  And as a parish, we had taken a stand against doing (i)all this(i) mean.

     "Well, see, that's just it." 

     The man did not see.  What he did see was a table from someone else's house piled with playing cards and "chit".  A shoebox with index cards and money.  And a smell in the air that he found offensive.  "What's just it?" He held firm in the toe hold even as part of his mind put pieces of a puzzle together.  There'd be no back-up on the Cultural Affairs "mission".

     "You're accusing us of something you know nothing about." 

     "Well, I know a little something about everything so 

     A chair scraped the floor being moved away from the table and a tall, skinny boy darted towards a backdoor.  The man reflexively started to give chase, but the woman tripped him.

  Thin foot trails had turned wider as a gaggle of (i)wanteds(i) had been brought forth for internment.  Marched for miles and miles in some cases.  No end to the griping and (i)wait 'til my lawyer hears about this(i).

  At a junction spot a team readied to receive people who'd chosen to group together but had refused to declare cause or other identifying attributes.  "Just black folks is how I heard it," one team member told the others.  "Well, then, we've got to be especially careful." 

    A car that had been traveling in certain circles throughout the region, and so recognizable, was placed purposefully kind of out of sight, but not hidden.  Mock bags of drugs were logged and doled out to law enforcement officers who'd arrived as on-scene commanders.

    For several nights in a row the more minor-infraction people were welcomed into camp.  But before the criminals-on-the-run and the to-be-court-martialed were brought to be put in "paddy wagons" there was a wave of "attack".  This forced already thin "troops" into a (i)spread out(i) that made assurances of safety precarious.

  A laserbeam hit the driver's side window in the dark.  And almost immediately a bullet crashed into the windshield.

      A sea of different colors and cause flags.  But then those gathering days end.  A world-renowned activist explained.  We were in a five-tree-junction-spot.  Each field trip "out" was deciding (i)who am I now(i).  For some strange reason it had to be that cultural interpreters came from the five different directions and took a respite with us.  A man and a woman, young, standoffish smart, discovered that they'd both grown up Muslim, but found other avenues of spirituality more satisfying.  They didn't agree on much else in the sort of "speed-dating" round of (i)tent together for the night(i)?  The summer was nearing end and we'd picked the brains of people who'd survived other winters in the mountains.  So that was a part of each day thinking about not just the day/one day at a time.

      The sistahs had arrived.  One kept asking questions, out loud, of everyone.  "What are all these people doing in the woods?" 

     "I don't know," was the common answer.  This went on for three days of the five day camping trip, two days to get from and to Jersey.  Another sistah was "just amazed that's all." 

     "She doesn't get out much." 

     "Yes I do." 

     "No.  You don't." 

     "Okay.  I don't.  Even though I do." 

     A third off'd her roles of the past couple months, finished the beer she'd started over s'mores, and publicly disowned her children, "at least for the next five days".  "Where's Mahgie?" 

     "Off with her old people friends." 

     "We good?" The coals from a breakfast fire and warming socks glowed to a salmon-orange color from burning bright red.

     It was maybe about an hour later when one came back followed by four or five other young women.  "They have issue with something you wrote." 

     (i)Huh(i) "Me?!" 

     "You are Lara, correct?!" 

     "What is it about? I mean, which sentence?" 

     "Girls." 

     "Hi.  I'm Gloria." 

     They'd snagged him.  Our friend.  And the authorities kept calling each of us "crazy" with our reports of "look-a-likes" and some "parallel universe" that fools children into staying with "them".  Whole churches would seem normal on a Sunday and then cover the cross.  "It's defunct," they told a realtor.  "Not enough congregants."

     

Three days later

     a scientist who'd been spoon-feeding a malnourished spider monkey had finally accumulated enough left-over gas points from retail and fast-food mangers sent around to secure their chains explained, sounds er false.  Dee armadillos are equatorial creatures.  They are reawry wery boring.  Dey go round and round, sleep, eat, sleep, eat.  And when season change dey get all messed up.  This was news to an animal shelter who'd received no less than a dozen severely harmed armadillos.  One still on the shovel of a roadworker and labeled with fingerprints and a temporary "badge" number.

"That's seventeen people!!"

  The man said it again as he walked past 17 pair of feet, seated, hands in plastic twist ties.  Then he looked at the small electric car he'd been sent over in and scratched his head. 

     The young Detective called out, "I think you, or someone, should see this." 

     And then, the report read, Someone, not the ascared mule, grabbed some sort of whip found in a drug raid, and aimed, wrangle-style at the accused murderer.  The someone said, "WHAT'D YOU DO TO MY ARMADILLO?" and dropped him like a log by getting the whip around his legs.  "There's five more people," the man said aloud at the pile tied together with an extension cord. 

     "Why is my husband so-called under arrest?" A lady asked. 

  At first no one said anything.  Though some were still groaning in pain.  Then a different man got out of the electric car and said equally as loud, "Mr. S, I'd like you to meet KamKam."  The woman's jaw dropped and she drew in a breath, and a sort of snort of shock.  And she said, "That's not my name." 

     Patched through, the man who could not sit or stand and so had been put on a ladder sighed heavy as his wife said, glad you're alive.  You silly fool, Westerns are supposed to be filmed in the West.

      A field had to be designated place, though not announced sometimes as work days pushed through (i)shut down(i). So all involved in a place had opportunity to learn.  Seemingly quirky stuff like (i)don't smoke your Reporter's notebook(i).  "Why?" 

     (i)Well, because it's unhealthy(i).  "Why for real?" 

     Academic credentials had to be checked for okays to share info.  "You might get an answer, a better answer, if you ask that person over there." 

     The response might be something on a spectrum like, "Not a good time for that question." Or, "Excellent question." If you'd been put in a Journalism "pool" you might move forward in a "queue" (cue).  Old schoolers might consider the question common knowledge amongst tradespeople, or might not know exactly.  Can be funny, some of the answers.  The gist--- when Print Matter is a unique category, it's an insult to "newspaper".  And it could be someone else's something.  Even having to do with world-doings as opposed to private affairs.

     

    It wasn't a "staging ground" and it wasn't "triage" although the mounting wounded needed both.  If those of us who'd taken a stand on religion and nation were a marsh of cattails, the tide had come in high and smacked into anything jutting out.  Our "heros" were men and women thrust awake to vulnerabilities within "the system" and a dulled local.  The system and the local were getting overwhelmed by a modern age clashing with old fashioned.  Gen X stepped up as conscious bridge-workers at that time.  And we kept stepping up as the nation faced the facts of homeland "frontlines".

     "You people!  Really pissing me off this morning." The guide's knapsack contents were not completely back in place.  "Are you seriously pissed?" The guide made a neutral face to disguise emotions about something totally "personal life".  Threw the net at the kid.  Wondered out loud about schedule.  Grumbled (i)just try and keep up(i), "First days are harder than the rest."

     

     "Well, I don't like being messy about it Devi."  A brother sort of snickered but not a villain's snicker.  It was still too soon to leave after the unofficial end to the British car show.  Their Dad had been torn between "old peoples' home" and not retiring per say, but easing into a different role, same armchair.  "Really, I don't see what your issue is Brom.  I feed you." 

     "I'm off routine and shedule." 

     "Is he (i)scared(i) to come out of there?" The brother called out loud enough for the family to hear.

  "Don't shoot; that's my suggestion," the team leader called out while being video'd and camera'd.  The teams for the magazines had already been picked.  The videographer's filming was, unbeknownst, too close to action of a different sort than Nature.

   As it was explained to me after the fact of overlap, then liminal, when I was a student, based on admin mtngs and escalation of a wide array of issues (incl. pending vote-matters) there were phases of function.  As our nation moved towards "threat level"s, departments weighed in on standings of students, teachers, and staff and for only a brief time we were all in the, ex., Department of energy.  Then all agriculture, etc.  This so redundancy could be re-arranged, resources not wasted, and a compliant rank and file (even amongst creatives) could take shape whilst we maintained all our roles and ongoing work.

    Many of us were on Boards and investing in companies, so it was stressful to be avoiding Conflict of Interest.  But quality allies stepped up at every turn without aiding and abetting.  We all had to be careful about helping as "fugitives" was a category on par with keeping vigilanteism separate from legal terms like "manhunt".

    "I got rotated in."  The black woman in leftover pants from a group site clean-up effort slowly pushed out a breath containing (i)angry, but not at you(i).  While a forerunner from the Big Grizzlies (network people) had been hintimated to regarding a major issue, the locals had carefully preserved the sad truth's evidence.

     Wires had been cut.  Some co-opted as impromptu trip wires, actually connected to explosives.  A fire crew held up blackened hands.  A series of photographs recorded what had become troop movement.  Down to a person, the group had managed to make it out of underbrush without serious injury.

    "We put it in canisters Sir." 

     A convoy had made two crossings bypassing the scenic highways.  Two lingering campers had put their campfire's white ash in vegetable cans.  The metal was still warm as Ranger Tim knelt on one knee and dove into his "morning mesh", tentative planning, what had happened in the night, objectives: immediate and two-day.  He smiled at the campers, (i)good work(i) but they'd already turned to go.