kingtycoon | Snakes & Seats For People With Snake Knees

In North Carolina you can go to the strange old garden of poured concrete built by robber barons. There you'll see the largest or oldest or possibly both oldest & largest live oak in the state. This is a strange idea, presented not breathlessly, but earnestly - "we can go tomorrow and see a certain superlative live oak." You'll go, naturally - the south, or maybe the ocean, or maybe the college, or maybe the youth - something earnest & almost embarassingly well-meaning in everyone. You feel a little dirty, in yourself, being from the more... There's more to the world I live in, more- sure, but more of all of it. Not just of the cold stares but warm feeling as well - there's an evenness about the coastal world, down there, the warm world - it's as if things can't matter because everything is fine & nothing is dangerous.

B tries to persuade me, saying that there are dangerous animals, reptiles, something, snakes? People fear animals and I think, with a laugh - a calculated northern, big-city laugh, the stern cold laugh of someone who knows about both sides of the gun & so on - animals. I scorn them, they're all dangerous sure, but did you see? Did you see how the fucking sky tried to kill me? All week? This is the breadth of experience - that there are good & bad things that happen in season & that you'll endure both & be expected to - with the same positive but cheerless demeanor - that you will accomplish things or die, from not accomplishing them - that's the world I am from - and when you go to the warm southern beach city - there, the living is easy, you can thrive & find your own fortune by seeming accident, for every day is the same day and no day is dangerous.

Where it's not dangerous danger has to be devised- that's the human condition you understand. Danger has to be anticipated, or else you might fall prey to danger. If you're not afraid, you're not attentive enough to survive, on those occasions when fear is important to have. And so, you've got to stimulate fear, in yourself & others, you've got to spread a spurious idea of danger, if you want to do your part for the complacent, easygoing southern folk, the people who's days are all alike - one following another. You might capture all the scaled reptiles you could, you might open a serpentarium. Earnestly, but not breathlessly, I'm told: "We can go to the serpentarium."

It's not just serpents of course. Though there are serpents, dozens & hundreds. A king cobra is a king cobra because it eats other cobras, you see - that's the king designation among snakes, that it eats the others of its kind. The cobras don't menace with their hoods, but the rattlesnake shakes it terrible rattle, fiendish hissing, the whole thing. There are made up breeds of snake, inventions of the curator & captor of the snakes - a man of outsize opinions but without the requisite charisma to provoke any interest in them - he resorts to snake-charming as his way of warning you about the dangers - the all too visible, all too real dangers of fluoridation of the water supply & of the ever present treachery of contrails. Amidst all the displays of spurious serpents & patently false medical advice are impressively wrought displays concerning these matters - invented dangers for people who've nothing to fear.

I come home, eventually. There's a strange happenstance in Charlotte - my connecting flight. I run into Andrew S - fresh back from London - we're on the same flight home to Cleveland. He's not well though - sickened in London, and who hasn't been after all? So I offer him the balm of an airport crown royale because this is the propriety of the weary traveler in an unknown city. Of course the times are all confused by longitudes and our plane is missed - we part not with acrimony, but a certain distaste - having missed our flight, he is off to a hotel room - I decide I'll wander the airport for the night, which is the right decision. I take no photos there though, for fear of arrest or shooting - since the place is a crowd of soldiers of all the types- impossible to understand hierarchies & uniformed crowds of them wandering - seeming at once intimidating and altogether lost & hopeless, these idiot kids in desert camouflage in an airport in a city. They're prepared to react against the imagined dangers they've been prepped on - they've been to the serpentarium for sure.

In the morning I am on the plane, the ride is interminable, a man talks endlessly about himself in the rough ugly version of language reserved for the Cleveland West-Sider. A man who thinks himself clever & rich for having left highschool to be a mechanic - this is the archetypal man of the West Side a half-assed autodidact, a half-formed entrepreneur who will speak without cease for three hours about himself & his thoughts. I sit with Andrew S & write upsetting sayings into the photos of the inflight magazine. I apologize as he forlornly rolls his eyes- I swear off crown royale forever.

At the airport I gather my bag, which flew on in advance of me. It's handled by an affable, cheerful man, one I recognize as among my kind - the man of CLV - who is enduring the harshest conditions and puts on the glib face of one who is doing that which is beneath him in order to survive, but who cannot resent these circumstances, because the alternative is to be killed by the unforgiving sky. We all of us, work, and all our work is beneath us. But it must be done, and it's not like you had a lot better to do besides bore strangers with longwinded discussions of your important ideas. I get my bag and paste on a smile, I take the train to the bus-stop - on the train wolf-girls, they seem to be, hirsute in a remarkable way, like wolf-people. They are having long conversations in hushed tones about jail, and they say that I am handsome and that they like me, and that's nice to hear. I give them both a cigarette when it turns out we have the same stop, but I've nothing to say and don't want to be too interrogative about what happened in prison, though that would be a conversation to have to overhear on a plane. Instead it's muttered secrets on the red line. I get off at Quincy - which I usually don't do because, according to the wise old man I ride with in the morning "They be killin motherfuckers down there." But it's almost 10 and I see the uncanny sign - "This is your neighborhood. Don't Litter." And think, well, who's neighborhood is it? With a train station, a children's prison, and abandoned carwash and a large field of smashed wall-hunks. There's that overgrown field, a few acres along and it's full up of smashed up hunks of walls & foundation - and clearly not parts from a building that once stood there - but many pieces, dumped there, from what are clearly many distinct buildings. And how there, there is a bus-stop posted and it's the one before the Red-Line station, where Motherfuckers get killt, and everytime someone prematurely pulls the rope and everytime the bus stops, and the driver yells and everyone yells at the driver - because "Who the fuck needs to go to a pile of rocks asshole?" When that happens the driver does concede that he is an asshole, but we all know he has to stop because if the bell is rung and he does not, well. I assume there is trouble.

So I go to work. And I've been working a lot. It didn't feel like a vacation, though it was - in the south. It felt like a lot of things happening in a place where things happen at a steady pace in an harmless way, and that to spite me, the different versions of mass transit conspired, and then left me tired out and worn out at work. And then that I did not really stop until today, tonight, and that I need a vacation.

What's the biggest oldest tree in your neighborhood? Wanna show me?