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Excerpt from Urdoxa

By Kane X. Faucher

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Peter shuffled his cadaverous form into the passenger side while I dumped the last of our provisions in the trunk. We were leaving so much behind, more him than me, and so it was understandable that he was a bit nervous leaving safety for the first time on a trip during which we both suspected the prospect of return to be but an illusion held too high. Why should we return? Return to what when things were generally the same everywhere? No need to worry about the little contingent differences, for the form would be the same. Yes, the same five old school punks would make their appearance in every city along the way. The memories of the night before were still fresh wounds, the toothy man at the bar who so rightly said that “without media, we’d have religion.” Yes! Since way back! The alternative to worshiping the Roman gods was the religious respite of the circuses! But even then it was there at the circus that the gods were absorbed and made into lovely counterfeits, perhaps reified for the masses in the form of blood sports. And, hey, wasn’t Christianity taking its narrative from the idea of the agent and the captive audience, so ridiculously lampooned and cirquefied? Television is religion, an assimilated and reductive version that mutes the god references by a substitution, by making the gods human, making them sell products, produce ideal types of narrative…And it was more effective than Christianity because the laity didn’t have to wait until Sunday to get its dose of indoctrination—it could be anytime and all the time. Don’t act and look as though any of us has a choice!

From Chalk River to Sturgeon Falls , we encountered tiresome tough townies lost in the last decade, never revived, never brought back to the fold of the now. O those terrible captives of an island era that was so shoddy in its construction! All baseball capped and plaid-shirted out, with jolting revolting sneers and bodies that were reservoirs of continued bad breeding…Rural dysfunction. Luckily when we hit the rest stop it was night. The headlights cast an eerie spectral glow on the thick glades, the ever-imposing wall of pine that kept the highway embalmed from time itself. I just knew that one day the battalion of trees would overtake this weak stretch of highway and obscure its existence with an impenetrable density. And so yet another instance of Ontario’s cold jungle.

In Sudbury, it seemed that everyone was named Roy or Bill. Our first glimpse of this town of many holes were the one story aluminium-sided homes that could not be easily differentiated by the equally sized motor homes parked in the rough semblance of a driveway. Only the presence or absence of wheels spoke to us of a difference. We “dined” in a desolate bus station seemingly carved out of a cold, postwar Euro-scene I must have seen repeated a million times in Viennese film. After we threw stones at abandoned refineries, danced along the rims of slag pits, and winced at the horrible protrusion of car dealerships that stretched long cancerous tendrils between the acres of dynamited stone and which represented the fact that the economy had died a pitiful death, we made our way out. It was a more rustic and northern version of Detroit with escarpments of slag and iron ore.

From the not so aptly named Lively to Espanola, nothing of interest caught my eye save for an amusing sign that declared “Jesus is the Way!” This would mark the beginning of the end. And if Jesus was the way, the way to what? More open sores, desolation, disaster, cataclysmic despair? The way into the heart of madness? To the continued crucifixion of a nation crumbling?

Blind River was aptly named. There was an absence of signifiers, visual markers: not one distinguishing mark that would differentiate it from any other truck stop in the midst of this vast nowhere. Would Ontario ever end? Ah, but there was more desolation to traverse before we escaped the ass of Ontario and into the toilet of Manitoba.

Sault Sainte-Marie stopover: bingo halls, dilapidated buildings, a stupid heritage fort, red sandstone on the rehabilitated shoreline, poor housing, and its characteristic non-existence on Sundays. I had a bit of a crisis on Biggings and Pim, feeling that the emptiness would claim us for its own.

We wound our way to Wawa, brushing past the spindly conifers that clutched desperately upon the crowns of cliff faces. The gravel delicately furred the soft shoulders of the road, like some woman with alien curves I cold not remember, so undulating and cold. The harmless and slick-eared junkyard dogs of the Agawa Canyon store sniffed and issued barks that spoke more of an existential abandonment than animal confidence. We saw rusted out mining trolleys left to die, imported from the Sudbury legacy. The coastline died at Trail End, giving sway to the grey enormity of Lake Superior. There were lunging valleys of dense wood, the mimicry of a lush and verdurous Costa Rican island without the whimsy of a foreign land. Our car followed the slashing and arcing of the treacherous highway through dense igneous mountains. I thought we were going to spin out of control, crash into the side, be bowled over by gratuitously large trucks or the fragility of the mountains. The road signs promised the danger of moose that never appeared, another lying death trap. And still we were contained between mountainous walls of unending pine, every once in awhile broken by the intricate webbing of lichens that stitched themselves across the weary rock faces that dipped at sharp angles into the soft earth. And then there was Sand River and the legend of Barrett River…Lost islands of folklore that would be swallowed by forgetting as soon as they were told. Our car continued to labour and list over landslides, fallen rocks, construction debris, and the shattered remains of this land’s dreams.

Two hours out, we witnessed acres of brittle and leafless spruce, indication of a now extinguished forest blaze, read like the lines on a vast green-black palm. The gypsy curse of another predictable blaze was already in the works. I thankfully had Nietzsche stuffed in one bulging cargo pant pocket and Celine in another. I was prepared for any flight into madness with the promise of more madness, perhaps the only alleviation from this vast green boredom that threatened to eat us alive on the roaring road. The now lifeless love proclamations slashed in white paint across smooth stone faces…Denny loves Jenny, Ed and Pauline forever, and other such drunken declarations whose root would never be known…These struck me as particularly tragic, especially on such a lonely highway. The empty shell of romance left as text upon the coldest and most fractured of surfaces…To proclaim love in the loveless terrain…Who were these people? Why did they choose these desolate regions to immortalize their love? I would be left melancholy and confused in the presence of these things. O Canadian nightmare, your love upon stone and collapsing Inookshooks in the muted environment of a cold clime. As a word of advisement to travellers: in Wawa, refrain from riding the Big Goose.

We visited the big Winnie the Pooh shrine in White River that my friend had humped in one of his many trips from Calgary to Ottawa and in reverse. I gave my extempore monologue on how family entertainment was a blight on culture, at the consternation of those families who came to give tribute to their servitude, but I could barely remember it now…Something about the shameless merchandizing that preceded and followed from every stupid Disney-esque release. And something about the continued enforced sanitization of culture, the imposition of worthless bourgeois value systems, the prosaic genres (like boy and his dog, anthropomorphic animals, children as spies and matchmakers between divorced parents in the vain hope of granting hope to the hopeless), the fantastic idealizations of families that further entrenched the feelings that reality was inadequate in comparison to the wonderful fantasy reality of these narcotized simulacra.

“What’s the point of this trip?” Peter asked, a question so taboo that its realization could undermine the fabric of our actions, rupture the firmament of purpose itself. Nothing like an articulated purpose to render any action purposeless.

I couldn’t adequately cook up an answer, so I said what came to mind readily and in my current state of mental disrepair that a trip of this magnitude was sure to produce: “to increase the stores of our gorgeously uncivilized library, to subvert and reshape our own frail paradigms, to point our accusing fingers at the resolute mediocrity of the people all across this land. And, I guess, to learn something timely, but what exactly I do not know, for to know beforehand would presuppose the unnecessary nature of our journey.”

Marathon was almost literally a dump with a rundown and understocked general store run by an obese halfwit with the largest collection of antlers and boar’s heads I had ever seen, something out of a bad colonial-times-based mini-series. I half expected the proprietor to ask me if I wanted some ammo with my tobacco purchase, or if I was interested in a gently used pair of fisherman’s waders. The sea gulls were suspended in sky haloes, tracing ever-circling lines of stench emanating from some unexplained source. Marathon’s only product of export worthy of mention was understatement. The name suggested that we had come this far, and even at the fatigued state of near collapse, we could not rest here, but must go on almost interminably into the depths of the night.

In Thunder Bay, it became painfully apparent in a coffee shop that assholes in line and idiots behind the counter were a bad mix, producing for us weary travellers excruciating banality. Was this for our benefit? Was this intended to put us on our way, to leave their little rainy hell alone? Thunder Bay—at least the little we chose to see of it before the panic of being crushed beneath its fleshy weight set in like a fever—was an ever-widening hole in the ground with no center. You pay for the time of day there, but the rain comes free with every purchase, and soon you are drenched with the deep melancholy of this place…You just want to get out, not even bother to trash the already broken up hotel room you found while groping in the night and the tempest, pay your bill and get the hell out of there quick…The demons approacheth! Leave Thunder Bay before you become one of the many dull relics that reside there, before the walls close in, before you become the hunting trophy of the cruel and traffic-ridden roads! Yes, the highways are a death wish in action and the hotels are shored up by mutant moths and disease under every pillow. It is one of the few places on earth where listening to Tom Waits feels appropriate.

On the way to Kenora, it was a tad brighter—but just a tad, as if your captor decided to give in and open the curtain a crack. We were coming closer to the end of the tunnel, to the anus opening. I wondered if this was what William H. Gass had in mind…Stalagmite pines and spindly birch tore holes in the clouds from which the sun shone down in oblique columnar shafts, soon aborted in favour of intermittent showers. Too many meteorological divorces and confusion, too many days left unopened or open for too long. Kenora could only boast two things: big fish for the fisherman and freemasons galore. Perhaps there was a link, but frankly I was too tired to bother about it then, and in retrospect it doesn’t seem to matter at all.

We spent a few weeks in Winnipeg where we had a raging theological discussion on how Jesus reduced himself to the level of the spectacle to win over and convert the slackjawed masses that were only predisposed in dealing with the currency of spectacles. Only grand events of martyrhood, bloody deaths, crusades, sea partings, and other jejune items could evoke faith, could tease belief from the listless and fickle populace. My, how things refuse to change. We did take a long sojourn down Portage to a wonderfully stocked bookstore run by an old woman entranced by new age spiritual metaphysics; but along the way, the torturous way, we counted hundreds of addiction clinics which spoke volumes about this place. The Assiniboine River was a neon brown no matter how far along it you travelled. There were legions of zombie idlers in the malls, the dead and gutted malls with high vacancy rates that wouldn’t be resolved anytime soon. Something awful must have touched this city, we reasoned from observation, for the silence was so crushing and foreboding.

We were agreed that this was the central vortex of the nightmare, that all horror radiated from here to the outer fringes of the country. Not that it was the city’s fault, but rather that it had been the pawn—the victim—of economic promises. But when the sports teams fled and the hi-tech craze bottomed out taking so many lives with it, what was left was the shell of former economic glory. It was as if the entire city and its disfigured populace were soulless, husks of life where the main occupation remaining was loitering about for death. There was a peculiar number of abandoned buildings, dead malls, and crumbling streets, all set on voided Ordovician limestone that seemed to have been jettisoned from the earth, the rejection of one body from the confines of a larger one. Tried as we did, we could not locate the bar strip. A nightlife seemed to be unheard of, unless one wanted to drink absinthe alone in the park or shoot up in the alleys. I posed for a picture beside Winnipeg’s only real hero, a hero who just happened to be mad, who embodied rebellion and symbolized the schizophrenic reality of forced Catholicism upon a recently dispossessed Native class who had unwittingly been genetic products of both sides of the cultural dialectic: Louis Riel. His head seemed a bit disproportionately large to his body. They had made an iron Caesar statue out of him, had made his back turn away from the addiction clinics that seemed to rise up in his shadow. What cruel trick had been played on Winnipeg? And why were the mosquitoes so mercilessly cruel and abnormally large? Where were the residual memories of the Great Strike? Isolation and madness were key words here. The oppressive feel of this place was terrible enough to drive us out, yet also strangely compelling in its poetics so as to keep us rooted—as we had been for those fateful weeks. Why else had we stayed so long, each day resolving to go but each day relapsing to our hotel with the foul stench of defeat on our breath? We had to quit Winnipeg eventually; it was a soul-sucker.

What was this land of private property and the spectacle, united hand in hand? What was this frightful repetition stretched and stamped out across the boundaries of geography and history? The shopping mall arts? The emotional array as instructed by and viewed on television? The collapse of all machinery into one portable cellular unit? Was it the forced play of sex behind a series of screens, rapes behind parked cars, unspeakable tortures performed beside dumpsters? We saw the same tiresome motifs everywhere we landed, sometimes in the smallest details. Everyone staring at me with the same store-bought faces and store-bought colas in hand. All a store-bought feeling, proof in the pudding that Canada was buffalo to America. A long tract of deadly coloured products, warning signals the birds had the good sense to flee from. Oh so many truck stops that shrink and go cold when the Other infiltrates them.

It was deep into sunset and there was an introspective silence in the car. The trip had been taking its toll on Peter and me. Peter was driving, his foot a slab of stone upon the pedal, yet the landscape would not have it, would not let us pass any quicker across its face. No, it would rather wrinkle its brow and send us back a few miles to start all over again, to wind up at the same diners, to repeat the circuit until we just went mad or simply gave up. Like a gun to my back, the command of “settle here or else” was a constant threat to our going forward. We needed to buy some time, make a deal with this land on terms both parties could accept; Peter was too young to even consider compromise, but I knew the awful truth of the matter. We had borne it to heart for so long. Now was not the time to remain incorrigible; we were not invincible to the grating power of this land, its pull, the way it blotches everything, steals your sense of hope, sucks fascination dry from your heart. No, we had to gamble our way across. Many sleepless nights steeped in drink followed, all of it catching up to us, a policeman on every corner, another signifier about to erupt and liquefy us under the flaming pus of its sore. Whitewood, Saskatchewan was nothing more than a small town pie behind glass, under the unremarkable scrutiny of culturally disfigured and genetically downtrodden cowboy-truckers whose moustaches sank with the weight of beer, brine, or of the stroking madness of gleaming eye details on axles or loads. These were people who made their living being filled up and hollowed out again and again, full to empty truck, the extremes, the practical narrative by which they adhered…The code every trucker knew in his heart to be true, never mind us fancy city boys with our fancy ideas and details. This was of no concern out here in the fields, in the deserts, in these interminable open spaces that hissed in the wind. No, fancy stuff like that was for the layabouts, the good-for-nothings, the dreamers, those who didn’t have a clue as to what was what. And still those moustaches bob up and down, levering the lips to let in more pie or more steak or more beans. Perhaps another coffee, or then again to eye the city folk with suspicion, with envy deeply seated in their heads, ready at a flinch to crush us dead under their sixteen wheelers…Or maybe just to take us out back and break our faces with lead pipes so that the pretty words would stop nagging at their ears. They didn’t want to hear us, they didn’t want to see us, and we were the intruders at their diners and stops along the way. We were as hypnagogic to them as they were to us. To redress the wrongs that we had unwittingly committed against them was remediable merely by making our exit. But who would preside over as magistrate to redress the wrongs visited upon us, we who had built our homes so high? For justice is the stream that flows in only one direction, and it tends to, like water, seek a downward path. What are we mountain dwellers to do? Go thirsty? Who will slake us?

Peter and I went back to the car and kept driving until morning. No John Crownworthys there… We had to keep on the road, avoid the possibility that the dark prairie night would swallow us, or those vehicular toughs would ground us into the paved shoulder.

Oh moon, how disappointed you must be with us, to regard our failure with the same eyes. Share with us a rain of silvery dew tears…What have we done under the tyrannical thumb of progress, that which we hung up as a banner for all to see, for all to herald as the coming of the Great Days? The imposition of Americomaniac fantasies? Specularity is dead, long live the specular, the spectacle, the goddamn mirror we can’t seem to rip from our gaze? Chambers of techno-Wittgenstein, the hypnotism of a new bankrupt logic of hypercapitalism? The distillation and reproduction of the climate-controlled existence, the flatlining homogeneity of human emotions, the empty and overprescribed value systems begotten to us by those rich who wrote the rules centuries ago, the revisionist process amenable to robots? Is this what everyone was cheering about? Was this the reason for all the hype? Everybody around the TV fire or the dinner table sagging under hamburgers and greasy condiments…Eat of the body of America which is your only true Christ, and everybody partake of the sacramental pink cancer that is your contribution to history, the pink cancer that is contained in the perfectly manicured lawns and plastic fences and community barbecues. Everybody eat in synchrony. A Cadillac in each driveway (and a second one to that lucky family that sacrifices the most, that blubbers most convincingly at the raising of the flag). Dripping meat grease, as another kind of more or less sapient meat slops it all up, one big gobbling platoon of supersoldiers ready to bear constitutionally supported arms against them enemies…And, hey, we’re all writing and starving here, so fuck you! Would you put a bullet in my brain just to get your picture on the cover of Stars and Stripes? But your fantasy will end when the cancer turns its cyclopean eye toward you, when it licks its multiple lips…

The high point was the dawn stopover, a gorgeous prairie morning spying the vast hairy plateaus between a bottle of near spent whiskey and a cigarette: all items of the furred mouth and the burnt out rubber soul.

“We’re not too far from Medicine Hat,” Peter said, more trying to read himself into the idealization that was the map than the map itself. “Maybe we’ll see a few pronghorns along the way. Wouldn’t that be a welcome change?”

“Or hit them with the car, which is, I guess, one way of seeing them, if but for that one split moment as its body hurtles into our windshield and kills us both. I’m not irate at this point, but fuck it all, it would be a welcome change. I’ll tell you that a horn like that is a bitch to yank out of one’s ass. You got to play it like a clutch, a few decisive and firm jerks and it’ll crack right off and you’ll be walking bow-legged for the rest of your miserable life.”

I was feeling downright oily in body and spirit, like I was some devil’s crankcase in a ’62 Comet. Peter just gave his hair a nervous morning stroke and waited for me back at the car. He was fiddling with shit in the backseat, no doubt trying to find the one grounding item among his possessions that would make sense of it all, or perhaps trying to lure me back with the sound of another bottle. He knew I was running on empty in a variety of ways. What was there left to say? Far too much, and I think that was what paralysed me, and also paralysed this whole world.

“When do we ever get out of this mess, “ I said, not looking back. We were low on funds, on food, on booze, on smokes, on morale in general.

“Pardon?”

“When do we get out?”

“From the car?”

“No, from all this,” I gestured hopelessly at the empty terrain with a wave of my arms. I was sweating and it was barely a few minutes on sunrise. The sky and the land were both of a weak pastel colouring. Beautiful, yet toxic…Somewhat too suspiciously serene, like a bomb was poised above us…And maybe that bomb was in me, ticking toward the blast with each passing day.

“Right as rain, I hear ya,” he agreed, seeing the state I was in. “There is no out.”

“So, just chamber upon chamber of noise and malls and ‘We the People’ who don’t give a flying fuck what happens anywhere or to anyone else…Save for, perhaps, the TV stars and the pointless politicians. It’s this blind disregard that is so crippling…and infectious…I feel it crawling all over me, trying to find a way in.”

“You getting back in? I’m feeling hungry and want to get in Med-Hat for some old fashioned breakfast,” Peter added to my lament, always thinking with his stomach.

“Idiot,” I laughed, “breakfast is for those who sleep, who dream. We’d be on an extended dinner ad infinitum. It’s always dinnertime and we’re always last to the table, pulling scraps from the floor and licking at crusty forks. The buffet has gone on without us, friend, and the most we can do is make a show of it, make that we’re good sports who don’t argue or ask for much, or who are just so grateful to not get what we really deserve. That’s how it is.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? We’re not going for breakfast?”

“Nothing, nothing. It’s lost on you, so forget it. We’ll go to this breakfast, play the farce out a little longer, maybe get lucky, maybe get killed en route by a bad-natured antelope or bitten to death by poisonous snakes. I don’t have any answers, and the direction we pick is just too arbitrary for me to care whether or not we stop at the West coast or keep driving into the sea. We just have to keep moving or something terrible will overtake us; that is key. I feel something creeping already, and the only way to stave off this something is by movement.” I returned to the car after having my fill of the cowboy painting slowly changing colour before my eyes.

In Medical Hut I met a large Native fellow named Les who got stranded on a drinking expedition that forgot how to tell time. He had been camping out with friends a few miles out and they all decided to rape the bars around here after the tent supply ran out. Another mass-produced shit expedition. He told us a few stories still fresh from the forge known as the night before. I record them here because they are precious to me; they elucidate something hidden in the tale of the Canadian nightmare that plagued us all:

“So’s I went to this one bar, eh, and, like, walked in…And, like, I guess they’d never saw an Indian before, or at least never in their bar. So’s anyway, they’re all starin’ at me like this”—Les made moon eyes, making us laugh, a well-executed impression, a natural storyteller to have seen him there in the early morning light in the big vast empty of the still sleeping town—“and one guy’s holdin’ his beer to his lips but it’s like, spilling all over his lap. It was strange, man. So’s what’s an Indian gonna do? So’s I order a beer and they’ze leave me be, but, MAN! It was weird, eh? So’s anyway, I’ve been out having fun for awhile, but I don’t know how to get back to my campsite.”

“Is it far from here?” Peter asked, visibly crestfallen that the story had come to an end and a request for direction having taken its place.

“Oh, no, just about a ten minute drive out, but maybe I can save money by walking if I can figure out what direction I need to go…Yeah, when I was out at the site, I asked my friend in the other tent if he could give me a hundred bucks—cos I needed to have drink money—but he said he only had forty. Another friend had given me twenty so’s I said alright…Sixty bucks is better than nothing, eh?”

“Where are your friends?” I asked, enjoying myself immensely. Les had this naturally affable character about him, something so preciously real and human, so benevolent and conducive to good will. Just looking at him, I gathered that he was the kind of drunk to laugh a great deal.

“Aw, man! They must have, like, abandoned me, I forgot my smokes in the bathroom of the bar and told my friends to wait. But I guess I took too long and they left without me. It’s been about an hour and I’ve looked all over. I just wanna go home, y’know?”

“Only too well,” I said.

“Yeah, and like, I don’t know what’s with young white guys—no offence—but around here it’s like I’m from the moon.”

“Makes no sense,” I agreed. “This town is full of barbarians.”

“Ha, ha, you got that right. Maybe they think I’ve come to reclaim my land or sumthin’. I was just out to party, y’know? Wow. Anyway, take care. I have to get a cab or sumthin’.”

“You, too.”

Everybody shook hands. We forgot all about breakfast. Thanks to this chance encounter, a bit more of this trip was put into perspective and it gave us a second wind; it said that there was still some humour to be had in this world. I had a big plate of hot sunshine in my face anyhow.

Tilley, Brooks, and Bassano looked like quaint places to die, cowboy suburbs and all. All it meant was that it was another two hour lurch to Stampede central, i.e., our Calgarian hotspot. Calgary was a sprawling cancer thankfully populated by many bars and a glut of used bookstores to idle away the time in. It had a strong sub-terrain scene, too, juxtaposed against the more stereotypical repetition of rural jocks and trashy cheerleaders.

We passed the Ponoka mental health resort under the knife sharp prairie sun that had reached its midday zenith, its most fiery hostility. Canola flowers reflected harsh yellow back at our faces. We gradually took a rest in Camrose to witness a frightening country jamboree and parade in this otherwise sleepy seniors town.

This was cattle country, dancing in the canola fields, the pendulous movements of the oil wells…

Note to self: West Edmonton Mall was the world’s largest collection of simulations and pseudocultural codifiers. Baudrillard was right: this was hyperreality.

A man can’t feed himself on applause alone.

It had to happen. We crashed our car in the badlands while a tad inebriated, doing dangerous donuts upon uneven surfaces. How were we to know that the cliffs were that steep? No injuries to report except the prospect of a bruised credit rating. I went leaping and screaming about among the hoodoos in Drumheller while the sound of a distant Spanish trumpet rose like a mist in the canyon view of the evening sky, playing its baleful tune to the increasing insistence of the hallucinations from those goddamn drugs. Beautiful. Friends, this was the end of all history, right here, in the desert. All that was palpable, tactile, realizable, was a distant mirage of dead spirit. Just another corpse of the Enlightenment unearthed by erosion and busy hands. A museum piece. The end! We were sick to death of the will-to-professional bullshit that had overtaken this world, so business-like, so devoid of anything we could remotely call worthwhile. Everyone we knew was a professional something, a goddamn entrepreneur, an accredited know-it-all on some really context-specific piece of the world pie. I don’t want to hear it! Professionals are the ruin of all civilization!

Like cattle, the tourists wanted to follow us everywhere: over the hoodoos, up the coal seams, into the cactus patch. The tall cliffs blistered with the orange fire of sunset. I was stoned, and I thought the tourists with the cameras were chasing me, like paparazzis in some future-fantastic world where I was some icon who could heal all wounds. Or something. From the dusty satchel I recovered from the car crash—the wreck so many had gathered around as if it were another fascinating geologic formation—I gripped the neck of a whiskey bottle, held it against the sun, and marvelled at the magma colour of the rays passing through it. Pulling out that bottle like that had the same effect as pulling out a gun or a cock on a crowded street: everyone scattered. Goodbye tourists, I am an alcoholic…Hide your children, avert your eyes, but the tragedy is all yours! This WILL BE on the test!

What of the Bukowskian disregard, this not-yet evolved fatalism(--or was it nihilism good and proper?)? Was this another repeat of Fear and Loathing…? But one form of nihilism could and would be exchanged for another. No doubt I was learning the ropes, getting a feel of what it was like to realize the true essence of my life: a non-stop cavalcade of fragmentary jump cuts set to a detuned mandolin. In short, what it was like to be transcendentally fatalist in a time when conventional, run-of-the-mill fatalism wasn’t enough. The province of Alberta cleared my mind and filled my veins with oil and sand.

“What’s the destination?” Peter asked, always with those eager eyes and goddamn questions that cut right to the bone like a damp wind, without the usually expected artistic dilly-dally and floral prettiness of our ilk.

“Go west, young man, the poster says.”

“A tired expression.”

“Not as tired as the one who carries its weight on one’s tongue, and indeed not as tired as the west itself…with all its invasions, all its privacy and resources ransacked by those beauty-seekers and mountain-tamers. Not so tired at all compared to the west that we will behold, a west raped so many times it has become delirious. We’ll hit Vancouver…”

“And then what?”

“And then what? Jesus, you remind me of a Christian propaganda brochure always asking that asinine ‘then what?’ question, always seeking absolutes to fill the void left by monetary success.”

Please define absolute.”

“Don’t get fucking cute. Ask the magic bottle; it has all the answers,” I said, thrusting the whiskey into his hands, those hands so tragically desperate to lay upon the truth. I hadn’t the heart to tell him right off that the truth was not to be found anywhere, and that he was perhaps holding so carelessly in his hands the closest approximation. It must have been a burning question because he drank deeply.

“We’ll go to Vancouver, find a place to live, go to school, descend like hawks upon the ‘scene’, and find out what’s what. If that place only succeeds in twisting the riddle that much more, so be it. We tried, and if we fail that is not such a bad thing either; never underestimate the glory of failure. Perhaps it’ll tell us once and for all that the whole search was a bad farce, a piece of theatre that proved both slightly amusing yet disappointing on the whole.”

I had been planning this for awhile, though I made no mention of the final destination, already carved out for us by a geographic limit where to go further west would be to drown. To have posited it earlier would have diminished the feeling of a journey without end. I wanted Peter to feel that hopeless feeling of a journey without a plan, for plans seem to spoil the moment of experiencing fully what is immediately present, and plans always have us thinking so pathetically into the future. What about the now, and what about spontaneity? This is what I wanted to promote, not the agony of the preformed plan. That is probably why I had withheld the plan from him until then, until the “and then what?” questions got too irksome for me to handle without doing violence to an otherwise good kid. He had first to experience the desert before these questions were even remotely pardonable. This he did, and he weathered it all quite well. Myself, I was a bit worse for wear, but nothing a stiff drink wasn’t already fixing.

Finding a small brasserie in the middle of a dusty zone, we talked Miller and ate ham, affirming the cruel reality of the mediocre world with every unwelcome kiss from the TV. And then what? The hotel TV, the hotel where we stayed later that night to plot conditional plans for our escape from cattle country. The man below was kicking his room to pieces, something about a woman and some drinks. “I’m a French realist!” he hollered, deep in a cheap wine stink. He certainly was, and he probably had a trail of failures and a damages bill to prove it.

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Kane X. Faucher is an Ottawa writer and theorist. His novel, Urdoxa, will be published later this year by Six Gallery Press (Ohio). He is currently defending his thesis on Deleuze contra Hegel.  His website is www.geocities.com/codex1977/index.

© 2004 Me Three