COMING SOON: Let me teach you about Hill Aspecting.

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40% Chance of Rain

"In life we always, it's - it's almost automatic, we've been taught to do this ever since...forever, in this shithole."

I'm thinking two things, right now: There is no telling where this interview is going to go, and there is no way to know how much this man understands.

"I'm crouching low to the earth, chuckling to myself over the learned foolishness of the white-man with me as I reach my index finger into the hollow of the negative space of a heel print that was clumsily left in a gravel driveway off of some abandoned and forgotten access highway and describe everything about my pasty-faced friend, right down to the salad dressing that my new partner from Washington D.C. (with whom I am simultaneously amused and disgruntled at having to work with on this murder case but it's okay because I know things about him that he doesn't know about himself and I'll eventually help him have the greatest moment of self-disclosure in his life) had on his appetizer salad at Applebees last night. That's what the Bulakawi were like with me, when I asked to be allowed to be a part of their 'Slefkra' ceremony. One of them actually pointed at me, and with tears in his eyes said 'Ei-au-topo.' I came to find out it means 'hole' like a hole in the ground."

Really.
He tells me I remind him of Gary Webb. I think I'll take that thin-mint now, Doctor.

I'm weighing my desire to get away from this man against the possibility that this isn't going to be a nelson pickle of an afternoon. A nelson pickle is a dangerous situation to be in: where everything conspires in situ to produce a composite and holistic negative experience. The cosmic tumblers of the universe click into place, and you can pronounce the words in your heart "I want the opposite of this."

"So we always designate rough numerical probabilities for the likelihood of something happening or not happening and we do this to give ourselves some kind of ded. reckoning, it's not astronavigation anymore, and your average harbormaster thinks a sextant is something you pitch in the woods on motorcycle trips for quick regret creation. No. It's crappy cosmic craps and the odds are not good on planet casino."

"He's got a 50/50 chance of living."
"There's an 80% chance I'll be there."
"And so on..."

I don't know where he's going with this so I go:

"And you see our tendency to negotiate with our fates, rough-hewn them how we will, in terms of percentages and probabilities as.."

"It is a function of our sense that nothing is certain. And that's just not the way it is.You're missing the boat here little dog. John Zerzan was right but he didn't go far enough. An ancient Greek never asked him why he used the word nautus for boat. Nautus was nautus. It could not have been not nautus. But Our words....whoa."

Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

"There's a 40% chance you will like the book you're about to read. You put the book on the desk. There could never be a 40% chance of desk."

It started to rain.

The Bulakawi

"They wouldn't understand you in any language" he giggled between bites of his thin mints. "That's the most mind-blowing thing, I felt like I was on acid just being around them."

I'm sitting in a Grey-hound bus station near Birmingham, Alabama. My quarry is a middle-aged, rail-thin "professor" who has just published a book about, what can only be described as his mid-life crisis. But not any mid-life crisis, most middle aged men just buy a new car or take a kick-boxing class, or start to tend to drink a little too much.

This was a mid-life crisis on steroids, to the tenth degree, multiplied by a million.

"It was birth, auto-generation, a crystal consciousness chrysalis of a million, million illuminations. An entire kingdom, there is no scientific taxonomy for the discrete and enormous differences in perception i have experienced."

He wants to talk to me, and take me hiking or something like that.

December.