Flightless Dreams and Dark Humour of a Post-W.orld

George W. Bush cartoon with international justice symbol by Galehr

"Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." — George W. Bush, LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000 (BUSHISM)

I happened to have spent my entire primary and post-secondary education in America during Bush W's regime. My freshman year in High School started with 9/11, and by 2007, I fled to Cairo, Egypt, having had just quite enough of American life under Bush W. In the course of those seven fateful years, I lost a lot of hope in all political righteousness, voting and demonstration included. Our world will never be the same. 

________

Departing from the downtown train, a friend blanks off in another direction, holding her pistol and handing one to my wife. She’s gone to shoot two of my childhood friends. “I’ll only kill one,” she says. All the while, I feel a similar fate between my wife and I. 

One of Four Freedoms Murals by Norman Rockwell

Entering an emptied church in a historic neighborhood, I kneel down on unfinished concrete flooring, bare as my back as I lift my shirt. My wife then raises her pistol and commences to shoot me straight through above my stomach, below my lungs, a perfect shot, just so much that I’ll survive while experiencing the bitter pain of the act and my coursing blood. As we exit the building room, outside on the street corner, our friend rushes over, hiding her pistol in a bag. 

La Chapelle de La Madeleine à Malestroit by Alexandre Bloch

At my feet, I see a broken skull. I can see the smile of my childhood friend eerily emanating from the skinless mouth. Supposedly, the other under our friend’s thumb, my other childhood friend, got away like me, shot clean through the back. 

________

Moment's seasonal greeting, here in Virginia the human weather anticipates unprecedented climactic shift. We are aware, N. Americans, ready? He closes, "I'll be home for Christmas."

- excerpt from "The Pleasant Man"

Occupy Demonstrator Forced to Immigrate to Egypt

Spring by Abel Grimmer

[In a vivid dream dreamed in my mother's house, the home where I first took flight from the nest, I experience a dream unlike that yet experienced on this visit to the places of my origins.]

I am an Occupy demonstrator; with stereotypical shaggy hair and a wiry beard sparse enough to age me youthfully. At first impression, a fire-born Sagittarius without regret or remorse. I have a taste for the insane rush of amateur denial. A ferocity grows in me to bleed with the public truth of mass suffering at the hand of the few: 1%. I feed off the morning dew before the violent marching of our militant society exhales its smog of consumptive dread over the undreamed folds of a quotidian, earthly stress.

With sudden instantaneous manifestation, my surroundings turn into a punctilious mold of congruent geometry. A seemingly shapeless mass of grey and beige frosts the walls of my interior perception with gross boredom. Enraged, I tear with mad vivacity for a new paradigm. Social dominance does not move astray from my line of sight as it defies internal contemplation and steers ever clearly into the bedrooms of the few: 1%. I give them all the middle finger with raw, open tenacity.

I am reminded of W. Bush; his first trip outside of the U.S. after his term of totalitarian presidency. We geared to angry maximums in a show of torrential defamation at his name.

There is a slump in the public demonstration. The efforts sway to clandestine operation. There is an underground swell of purpose. An optimistic slumber chimes beneath the sidewalk cafes. I am welcomed at a subterranean meeting place. The air is unpredictable. There is a contingent wading in passersby and onlookers who wonder about the end of their movement; it may be nearer than they fear. I have a purpose. I make my delivery and ask desperately for a place to sleep. I need to rest on a surface other than that of concrete smoothed by nylon. The muffled sound of sheets once quelled my silent might and now I am only stirred with the jarring gripes of untrustworthy leaders from this, our autonomous modus operandi of Darwinian survival.

Sleepless, I cower trenchantly outside the walls of an Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. The streets are emptied with sacred failure. The notches of murder scale high across the batons of the street police. I have come here to die to the American Lie. I wait restlessly, dealing with bureaucrats in twilight hours. The Cairo dawn inflames my vital organs with a need to escape this devil-coaxed life of American savagery. I fight for the freedom to move, for my wife and our sanity. We ask only to be awake, and not depraved of a social camaraderie known from collective suffering, shared through speech, and simultaneously lightened through action for one being, our whole. At the same time, we fight for the dignity to rest our heads on a feather of respect in this anthropomorphic hole of modern factory-style life ways.

The struggle continues.