Editor’s Note: Morning! The Interns are having an off-morning. Both Stephanie and Josh are unlocated, and since they are not generally restricted to the Loading Dock area near the barn, veteran writers have been pressed into service to examine this offering from the redoubtable Marlow. To help readers focus, there is an original work of verse below, common to our shared space-time continuum, followed by a seminal work from his book on entering the Coastal Empire. In it, he and his beloved W have left one unique living structure in marvelously unstructured Key West and are establishing a new way of living in old-but-new climes. We hope the Interns come back. We have promised to give more credence to their Post-Sense orientation in the new world they are making. The Writer’s Section spent time on a larger effort to understand some of our institutions in crisis. Their collaborative piece on The Bureau is under modification to accommodate the honorable service of almost everyone there. We think that is the way we are supposed to say it these days, right? – Vic
Author’s Note: Porch Bath was written in the aftermath of the 2017 Las Vegas slaughter and is tangentially related to my ongoingGoing Native Savannah narrative. W and I were still in the early days of our Coastal Empire educational boot camp. From the words below, so was our nation in the brave new world that was slowly revealing itself to us.
In retrospect, these events were, in the parlance of my old profession, an indication and early warning. Things felt fragile after that massacre in Lost Wages. How does this slow-mo war of the wor(l)ds feel now?
How does it feelTo fitInto their moldTo let go of what we knowAnd not have to hold our own How does it feelTo getAll that we can get All that we want to getIs that what we want to get? And how does it feelTo beWhat we’ve becomeWhat we said we would never beCause I don’t feel anything anymore How does it feelTo fitInto their moldTo let go of what we knowAnd not have to hold our own -Marlow
October 8, 2017
Porch Bath
With my attention consumed by the aftermath of the events in Las Vegas, I came to understand slowly how close our beautiful Victorian era neighborhood in the Coastal Empire is to chaos only in dribs and drabs. It was like retrospectively watching water dripping upwards up from the sink back into the faucet this week.
First: early Monday morning I found our black cat sleeping in a very unusual place on the top step of the staircase to the second floor. As I passed, I encouraged her to follow me downstairs by giving her some gentle love between her ears. She steadfastly refused to follow, let alone come into the kitchen for her morning feed. She finally came down two hours later when the sunlight had brightened the entire first floor.
Later that day as I came home from shopping, I found a crew of two older gentlemen who were assiduously cleaning our neighbor Ted’s front porch with 2-gallon sprayers and cleansers. On Wednesday, W got the 411 from Ted, our hairdresser, who lives and works his trade two doors down.
It seems that there was a multiple stabbing that took place on our street, on our block, and likely on the sidewalk not more than 10 feet from our front door that ended with the victim on our neighbor’s porch. The victim had nearly bled out before calling 911. The porch had been awash in blood, so Ted spent an hour that morning in the darkness hosing it off before going to work. Since the City considered the messy crime scene to be a health hazard, they sent their professional cleaning crew to render the porch and adjoining yard greenery safe for human habitation.
I wonder if the City of Savannah paid them in gold coins like John Wick did his professional cleaner Charlie in the movie of the same name. Regardless, the professional cleaners of Las Vegas will likely be allowed to enter behind the yellow tape today to begin their grisly chores. Before this week, I thought that by living in this small southern city, we had left all that sanitized-for-TV, big city, crime scene stuff behind. The two-guy clean-up crew next door said otherwise. In fact, as the days of this past week rolled by, we have been plunged back into our nation’s growing film noir crime scene.
I fully expect Hollywood will leverage this latest horror with some anime and gun fu technique laden film scenes in a spaghetti western revenge film where the mass murder perps finally get it in the end. But back here in reality land, we all have started to think about buying more guns. We are fearful — rightfully so. We fear a coming chaos and know that when it happens it will be coming to a nation that no longer can act in our proactive defense. We were given a unique, nationwide-broadcast warning of our growing fears of this coming chaos just two weekends ago during a 60 Minutes piece by Oprah Winfrey and national political pollster Frank Luntz. With Luntz’s guidance, Oprah ran a day long focus group of people from Western Michigan that surveyed a diverse group evenly made up of pro-Trumpies and anti-Trumpies. It was very good with one surprise when a participant mentioned “fearing civil war.” Both the anti and pro Trumpies supported this dystopian view of the future. You should have seen Oprah’s face. Even this practiced actress could not hide her surprise and fear. It was priceless.
What was instructive was how shaken the old pro Luntz looked after the event during a short scene at the close of the piece. It was obvious he has never seen such anger. He said that that was the moment when the participants went full on tribal mode. Oprah offered no on or off-screen comment on this (a good idea IMO) but sadly sought no further or follow up explication on the civil war remark. This string could have been pulled, and maybe they did but didn’t want to share even more unexpected results.
That many across the entire political spectrum, save each side’s leaders and their horse-holders, think the country is collapsing — society, culture, leadership — calls into question the elites’ and their leaders’ legitimacy. When cultural and social infrastructure crumble as our belief in its meaninglessness grows, then the implications are clear. Americans will purchase more not fewer guns and ammo because — oh, just pick one or more of the following — drug gangs, zero trust in our neighborhood’s safety, our personal and financial information just got hacked again, the country’s high tech Silicon Valley overlords are clueless regarding their customers legitimate needs, AI driven robots rising in rebellion after first taking all our jobs, etc etc. Yeah, this may sound like a Saturday Night Live skit but consider the 60 Minutes piece.
Things are very fragile now. Why the privileged few don’t get it is easily explained in that they didn’t get what happened last November and still don’t because nothing seems fragile to them. With their wealth cushions, they live in tony neighborhood bubbles with overlapping layers of security systems, doormen, and cameras. If a civil war comes, they may finally see what good those things are, just like the truly innocent did in Las Vegas last weekend.
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From My Isle Seat