One Year in the Life of “X”

By S. Jovian Radheshwar

That night I guess I just had a little bit too much to drink. Realizing this after driving for some three hundred miles across the great sate of South Dakota, I pulled my ride to the side, that narrow little strip of dirt, and drove off highway fourteen to a mountainous vista parking lot some six or seven minutes down the deserted country road. It was dark, the fog, ever persistent in this rainy season, had still not been lifted by the graces of natural winds, and the sunshine was not forthcoming today or tomorrow. This last fact of the week to be faced was confirmed, earlier; some states back, by the weather-avatar on the local radio, his voice trembling with the uncertainty of sciences unperfected through the crassness of commercial definition. Having forehand knowledge of the weather never really quite settled me in any way, and this last year I managed to learn the joys of precipitation, of which we are most starved in the sunny deserts of southern California. Life is nothing but sunshine on a cloudy day, exemplified by these here days when I have next to nothing, damn near nothing, to really say. Left speechless by the gallant hills and looming mountains at the western horizon, I rolled up a bone, and reflected. This temple of America was still untouched, despite the encroachment of republicans and their strip malls, and the ever-present Christian fundamentalist needed by the old ones to tell me that I’m on my way into a post-modern hell. A few months ago, I even gave in finally, and abandoned my dreams of universal dialectical materialism, and found myself on my knees from every now and then, praying. But I like to call that activity an exercise in mental focusing, a meditation; a tantric sexual conquest. So I started praying, and found some humanity in the isolation of total loneliness, the beauty of the natural world, the only realm worthy of my long-term dependence and fidelity. The death of the American dream so ruthlessly exploited and canonized by the writings of authors I admire, gave birth to a seeker-soul in this one, and I found what the American dream really resembles. The cities are dead-zones, where the ethnicities steer clear of each other, save for the white-yuppies, who pretend that they have friends who are “African-American”.

That’s another thing, you see, that whole ethnic thing. This past year I took and oath to call Black people Black people, Mexican people Mexicans and so on, etc. Some idiots may want to call me an Indian-American, but like I always suspected, such a categorization could only serve to exclude me. Being raised from age 1 in the belly of the Capitalist Beast, so recently dismembered with gruesomeness, I am an American of the highest order, of the greatest level of civilization, proudly hailing from a city that not only never sleeps, it never thinks twice. Those cats from the Aryan nation, you know, those stupid white motherfuckers, call themselves Americans in vain, the flag grants them no grace, no citizenship in the realm of ideals. To be sure, I also realized that my Indian-ness is fleeting, and I am more or less a homogenized white yuppie myself. Political correctness just gets under my skin, I suppose. I mean, when I hear someone criticize me for calling a Jewish fellow a Jew, and not a Hebrew-American, my reaction is: “HEY BUDDY, PEOPLE FUCKIN’ TALK LIKE THAT!!!” Oh well, I suppose that all this has something to do with how people like to lie to themselves and how the truth hurts and stuff. Through a conservative upbringing, I have learned to have no sympathy for these pathetically hapless mall-goers and sissy-ass boy band fans. They too, aren’t really Americans. They’d dodge reality at every given opportunity. Like the punk-ass ravers I saw at the only rave I’ve ever been to in Seattle last winter, they only seek escapism at all times, taking all they have for granted, unwilling to apply the energy to save their way of life. I only went to that rave to check out A Tribe Called Quest, who I’ve been getting’ down to from infancy to this day. After my niggas from Queens stepped off the stage, a series of utterly repetitive, non-descript “bands” of unimaginative monikers played their so-called house music, likely generated by a computer nerd in a moment of boredom or exhaustion while pursuing a more complicated algorithm. Having done my share of drugs and partying, with real people, I made some friends in high places, ranging from the United States congress to the sacred halls of the academy, and I know that life is work, work and more work. For men, there is little else.

Work, takes several forms. It constitutes, in addition to its more obvious elements, the labor of freeing the human mind from the machinations of social constructions long outdated and inapplicable in the mad future of the approaching inferno. Those southern Californians adapted to the smog befuddled me along these lines, as they seemingly fail to do be willing to work, to do the thinking and adaptations, to save their air, life’s fundament. This last summer, their laziness resulted in some years being shaved off my life, as I was required to be in the god-forsaken inland empire for the duration. These mall-goers in Cali are not so different from their Long Island cousins, living in a pointless existence dedicated to sustenance and the continuance of the cycle of ownership, of hoardings growing to unmanageable proportions. I gave up most things in the last year, save for the sticky green, the nicotine and the music, so fresh and so clean. All these fools can’t touch me in the highlands on this lovely night turned to dawn, they’re too busy doing their fuckin’ laundry, while I am contemplating intensely on exactly what it means to be an American. If I were in charge, I would make these peoples take citizenship tests again, including questions about Louis Armstrong, Public Enemy and Tom Petty, of course. In fact, new immigrants should be required to have ascertained this type of cultural knowledge as well, so as to not associate America with Pepsi and that stupid little hooker, Brittany Spears. Anyone with any taste thinks that the original Coke is a superior product anyhow, born in candy-shops in the deep south, in America, and not in some boardroom in some inaccessible office space.

The suburbs are bastions of ignorance, not just wealth and privilege. The true elite hails from the Upper East Side, from Park Slope, from Santa Monica, from Northgate, and various downtowns nationwide, where the true melting pots exist. These thoughts and others propelled the year of this soul’s journey to a better place, to a mind space unreachable by those believing in fate, condemning their will to power in haste. Leaving the hills that early morning, I couldn’t make it past the car, and I fell asleep in it, when America came under assault again, and I was rounded up and interned in a camp in the Midwest, in a location non-descript, unlike the heavens I touched early that morning. They thought the Buddha in my pocket meant I was a subversive, and they judged me with laws most perverse, in the face of an enemy far more deadly and exacting. The fight within raged on, in the soul of America, and the enemies defeated us in the end, much to the chagrin, of the free-minded liberal vanguard, to the joy of the conservative retard, and the bombs only emboldened our foes, and ripped us apart on the inside. Soon, there will be a major offensive from the outside, and we wont even be allowed to choose sides, so long as George W. is the moron at the helm of the new monarchy. Evil Dick Cheney, behind the scenes with the King’s aristocratic brother in the Banana Republic of the south, denying the leadership of America from the man of the most American caliber in the fiasco last November. Lets not kid ourselves, people, Ralph Nader is no great Jesus, and would have run for the hills faced with the dilemmas of the Presidency. A part of me still wants the King to be William Jefferson number Three. He’d get me out of the internment camp, and back into action, exposing the truth, helping steer the mighty ship of the western state to its prophesized fate of healing the human mind state, made irate, by wars at all times, and against humanity, there might not be any more crimes. The actual details of my past year’s life can be gleaned from these recollections of identity fluctuations; however, they are inconsequential in the face of the great wheel.