Hill Aspecting No.2

"How much longer?"

"We haven't even bagged half of the list of peaks so just suck it up, you downy fella."

"Shit."

I'm beginning to regret the whole thing.

"The Bulakawi regarded hills with certain religious terror, they masked their terror -of course- as deftly as the normalest of any white, educated, western, suburban woman, with a patina of colloquial suspicion and familiarity. The way you'd act around your half cambodian-half italian, three-card monty playing, best-friend's college suite-mate. Pol-Machiavelli-Pot Schemester. They're subtle beasts, hills. A hill is not a stale acclivity, inert and random. They betoken all sortsa shit my friend."

I am sweating moonshine, redbull and pickled eggs.

"Ok, so the rounded peaks of hills results from the diffusive movement of soil and regolith covering the hill. This is called 'downhill creep' - Which, incidentally, are the last two words my wife said to me when I asked her "Well where do you think I'm headed?" after the divorce. Grab a dictionary and look up: "Rhetorical Question" and "Irony" - Sweet mother of mercy. We are lost and alone, in the hills of nothingness and absurdity. Enough happy talk."

"That reminds me of a conversation I had last November"

"Oh, good, you're just now seeing how the past is connected to the present and how the present is connected to the future. That's crude and basic but you can call it learning. How old are you?"

"27."

"Well, better late than never."

"Thanks."

"Yeah, there's a name for it: Not high enough on top of the world, not bright enough in the night of the world. Convinced someone who believes in angels has nothing to teach you. Simultaneously bereft and spoiled. How is such a thing possible? I don't know. And I do know."

"That sums me up."

"Yeah you're trying to climb these mountains of vanity or you're wasting your time."

Hm.

"Look, little man, we all want to kick the fucking door down, all gang-busters, but when He rappels in you're just going to be ashamed of all the shit you thought was awesome and worthwhile. So climb your hummock of urine snow, your drift of vanity, your knoll of illusion, do a terpsichore on your talus of tawdry triumphs, your esker of aethers, your scree of shadows, your - you hate when I do this."

"Yes."

"You know I worked in a school once. What an interruption. Imagine this if you will: A KFC bucket, a broken clock, two unsharpened pencils, a sunbleached pepsi can with a pencil case beside it in the street, and a social studies textbook being thrown at a Catholic priest during mass. That's American Public Education. Incessant twilight bickering of a galtonized, darwinized orc-theater cuckoo clock."

"Huh"

"Between that job and the way my common law wife would announce some ridiculous wish while she was cooking spaghetti then break into peals of laughter and encore her little bullshit performance with a sigh and bulging forehead vein that sold her out I was between a rock and a hard place. She would stare into that pot like some heathen witch oracle hiding from Saul of Tarsus, inhaling noxious sulphurous psychotropic cave fumes It's amazing to me that I didn't die of alcohol poisoning a long time ago."

"You didn't want to star in 'SAD AND DESPERATE' with actor Lady anymore, right?"

"Something like that. Alcoholics always liken their moment of clarity to standing on a mountaintop or a hilltop, interestingly enough. I counseled former addicts for a while."

"Is that right Doc?"

"Yeah, I guess where we are standing is a little bit like a bottle of rubbing alcohol filtered through a loaf of sourdough hangover at your girlfriend father's Avalon, NJ house as he grills you about work and sports trivia."

"Rough. I know the feeling though. I was feeling like that for like two years, I felt as bad as a female extra in an E.M. Forster adaptation on the B.B.C. Like, Emily Dickinson certain slant of light-not leave the house-know all the words to 'HOOK', going to the movies with your parents, could update you on Sesame Street depression."

"Well, Life is an uphill fight, on a slippery slope."

"And if you don't lose your mind?"

"You move on to the next hill."

"And if you do?"

"You roll a wheel of cheese down the hill. Like the English. Let's get going."

The Unfeigned Votary

January 1 - A suicide bombing occurs in Zayouna, Baghdad, killing over 25 people during a funeral over the deaths from the preceding attack. The Unfeigned Votary makes his first public appearance.


January 14 - At 19:04:39 UTC, the MESSENGER space probe is at its closest approach during its first flyby of the planet Mercury. Photographs were relayed via satellites that revealed strange geodetic formations which would only be described as "it looks like some sort of hooded mystic." The Unfeigned Votary could not be reached for comment.


January 21 - Stock markets around the world plunge amid growing fears of a U.S. recession, fueled by the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis. The Unfeigned Votary could not be reached for comment.

January 22 - Russia stages the largest naval excercise since the fall of the Soviet Union in the Bay of Biscay. The Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, along with 11 support vessels and 47 long range bomber aircraft, practices strike tactics off the coast of France and Spain, and test launches nuclear capable missiles in foregin waters. The Unfeigned Votary only seemed to smile gently, almost impercepitbly and mumbled somthing about "errors"


February 12 - PDVSA, a state oil company in Venezuela, suspends sales of crude oil to ExxonMobil, in response to a legal challenge by them. The Unfeigned Votary would not comment.

To be continued...

Hill Aspecting No.1

He's standing on some blasted heath of a mountain top, mason jar in hand. You can smell his breath downwind - an admixture of rubbing alcohol and sulphur. The sun is setting over the Blue Ridge Mountains at what seems to be an impossible clip.

"Go on boy! It must be chow time. Look at 'im go." He takes a healthy slug of white lightning.

"What was I saying?"

"Hills" I venture a guess, trying my best to sift through the cataract of verbiage he dumped on me like a pot of cold baked beans.

"Yeah Hills...this shit is good try some of this shit it's as hot as the August sun and as cool as October my willowy yank."

"Hills. Right. As I was saying: I don't know how a human being can trust anything."

"Huh"

"Huh is right my doodle-dandy auditor. Hills don't create shade like trees, they create darkness. Vespasian loved the Visigoths truth be told, they were rough and ready farm boys, always good for a few yucks and really handy with a trowel, and they were super-men when it came to all of that hard shit like lifting bags of cement, and chopping wood. They cleared about 75 hills from Rome in order to make things like forums, bath-houses, mulsum taverns, you know - shit like that. Gibbon, excuse my language, is a little bit like you my swan-like, effete, northern patron-like guys who buys me moonshine. We're gonna need more, by the by." I nod. "So he wasn't an historian he was a piece of moist white bread and a pussy. And a retard. The VG's saw that this place was indefensible and with a wink and nod from ole'Vespasey (who never gave a shit about the soft cosmopolitan olive-eating, robe-wearing homoshack Rome) they seeded the fall of Rome. Them and the hills. Lead pipes my cold dead ass. No offense."

"None Taken"

"Compulsory education, TV, advertising, addiction, mental illness, plain old illness, the modern world, the increase in wickedness, the love of everyone growing cold, taxes, wage-slavery, devil worship, pollution. These are hills too you know. Hills create darkness. Not shade."

"Yeah, Doc?"

"Fucking shit right they are, lil'man. Woe to the man that cannot see tragedy on these slopes. Some can, some can't. It's dark in the valley now lil'dog."

The sun went down.