Hurricane Perry

As this last hurricane shows, we are not prepared.  It wasn't even a hurricane when it hit land, and still the estimate is one billion dollars in damage.  People died.  It was a media circus.

So what happens when Perry wins?  I am not prepared.  But I will prepare.  How?  What do I need to stock up and store?  I need a shelter, that is certain.  I would run away, but I've looked about after telling my friends that the world must think us buffoons to have the likes of Perry, Palin, Bachman, et. al., and everywhere I look. . . there are buffoons.  Maybe the fundamentalists are right.  Maybe these are End Times.  It will be if CNN has its way.  It makes great viewing.

I started a photo essay years ago called "Last Days" that I didn't continue.  I do that a lot.  But my answer for years to just about everything is, "it's the end of the world."  Everybody knows that.  I almost like the phrase "End Times," though I would rather have it be "The End of Time."  That would be better.

But End Times is what we have, and we will have to live with it, though it confuses me why Jesus was only concerned with Jews and never mentioned Moslems.  But listen, I am no Biblical scholar.  I barely know this stuff at all.  Most of my knowledge of it comes from literature, especially Milton.  "Paradise Lost" is not much of a handbook, but it sure explains things much better.

Now Perry is an End Times fellow.  The others are, too, but I think if you are a fundamentalist, you have to favor the fellow, though I imagine there are reformed fundamentalists who believe in women's rights as long as they don't go too far.  Still, I'd have to give the advantage to that crazed masculinity of Perry.  He looks like a fighter.  Well, not so much a real fighter, but someone who starts a fight when he has the numbers.  Maybe you grew up with some gentility and don't know, but if you ever had to hang out with half-demented mean ass rednecks, you know what I'm talking about, that guy who is better looking than the others and a few I.Q. points ahead who knows just enough to act tough when you are outnumbered real good and has a nasty wit when it comes down to it.  That's Perry.  A man who never backs down when he has the advantage.

Fortunately, I grew up with the types and have learned to navigate pretty well.  At some point, I'll probably have to abandon all of this.  Sorry.  But everything will go into shoe boxes that are kept in closets and only shown on drunken nights and only briefly.  I'll know where the secret places are.  I'll know the man who knows the man who can get you what you want no matter what it is, and I'll know the man who can get you out of a jam if you get in trouble, though it will cost you.  There are secret, sweaty handshakes you will have to make with fellows with eyes like Perry's, clever little pig's eyes that will know damn well if you are lying.  You will feel the unspoken danger in the handshake gripped too tightly for just too long, and you will see it in that smirk of a grin that is compliments the cold meanness of the eyes.  If you've never lived that before, you'd better read some Cormac McCarthy real quick.  Start with "Blood Meridian."  You will have trouble with the vocabulary and the brutality, but it will let you stomach "All the Pretty Horses" a bit better.  And then read "No Country for Old Men."  That should prepare you as well as you can prepare through reading and without getting your ass kicked on some dirt road by group of happy miscreants.  These are male books about the primal male experience.  Not males like Larry David and Woody Allen, but male like al Queda and and those boys on the ridges and in the hollers of Kentucky.  McCarthy is about as good as it gets.

So it's back to my roots, I guess.  It sure has been fun, though, lolling about cafes, buying antiques and decorating the house, and talking about Seinfeld and Austin Powers and those shopping and fucking movies with slick yuppies at dinner parties.  Fun may not be the right word.  No, it has been a nightmare, too, excepting the cafes.  I'll have to think this through.  We've been sleeping too long, I guess, living in la-la land.

But no time to waste.  I've got to get prepared.