For someone who can blather on and on about the unsung virtues of transformative change, I don’t seem to take it too well when the tables are turned. I mean, I’ve long since accepted plenty of undercooked truisms like “contradiction is balance” and “hypocrisy is relative,” and I’m often able to place seemingly bizarre paradigm shifts into meaningful context instead of going completely berserk with fear and loathing, but that tendency recently deserted me at a crucial moment. In fact, my usual keen analytical instincts failed so utterly that all I could do was merely assess the psychic damage and stand still like poor Brendan Frye, maimed and bleeding from every orifice and waiting to be mowed down by yet another New Reality.

For a bona fide rock star, I’m a man of surprisingly simple tastes. I like electricity. And amplification. I like wielding both of those things with fearsome power and sublime glory, and I’m not ashamed to admit that.  I love shaking up the citizens with a serious lightning bolt every once in a while, just to see them flinch. It’s one of my absolute favorite things to do. I mean, it’s one thing to be able to take a shock, but the ability-and willpower-to give a shock, to inflict a pure synaptic jolt of raw power upon someone else, well…that’s a whole other frequency, dude. That’s a level where only snow leopards play, ladies and gentlemen, and not many people truly comprehend what goes on up there.

Supposedly the universe is expanding at an incredible clip, faster and further than ever before. Well, the scientists are saying so, anyway…and since similar research has recently, and successfully, predicted other improbable things such as the Tampa Bay Rays making it to the World Series, or Barack Obama becoming President of the United States, why not trust the onward March of Science? There is untrammeled growth at every turn, unchecked expansion in every way. From my cushy corner of existence, however, the reality is quite the opposite. You see, my own mental and physical boundaries are most definitely shrinking, and have been for some time now. It isn’t as if I hadn’t seen it coming, either-hell, I aided and abetted the steady retrograde orbit even when I had the chance to do otherwise.  

I was one of the few volunteers. Oh yes, I was paid to screw that bear-paid very well, actually-but I started having second thoughts almost immediately. I realized I was in way over my head when the zoo gates closed behind me and the cages began rattling, the slavering detainees behind the bars smelling fear emanating from my every pore. There was no turning back, though, and the incentives were irresistible, so I trudged into the maw of necessity and received my orders like a good little cadet. The day I was inducted into the Non-Conformity Patrol may have been the first day of the rest of my life, but in many ways it was also the beginning of the end.  

I’ve been getting the shakes lately, and it’s starting to kind of freak me out. At first I thought it was just the same old inexorable onset of carpal tunnel that affects all designer-wordsmith-rockstars, but its rapid spread outward from my wrists led me to believe that it was in fact something much worse. My heart began to feel jittery, something lumpy and weird began growing in my right arm, and then I got the sweats and couldn’t sleep. I noticed that I was worrying more about what other people thought about me-an impulse that we all suffer from of course‚ but one I thought I’d finally put way behind me. It seemed the daily stresses of life as a Big-Chilling Thirtysomething were starting to pile up like 405 traffic through Sepulveda, physically manifesting themselves in my pudgy suburban physique. A distant howling of melodramatic paranoia began threatening my every waking moment.

I wake up late the morning after Olivia’s party, and am almost immediately hit with the full force of approaching armageddon. Worrying about Roy all night had kept me conscious until an absolutely satanic hour, and now after lurching through the bathroom-kitchen-closet routine at a sloppy pace, I blearily step into the end of the world when leaving for school. The air is thick and dry with smoke when I walk out the door, making me hack and spit involuntarily-but in between fits I look west toward the source and shudder. A massive ash cloud is blacking out Aliso Peak, slowly descending from what looks like somewhere in Laguna, blanketing all points east in fine flakes of carbonized snow. Trees, cars, sidewalks, streetlights, signs, and cheap Halloween decorations stand silent, all looking like they need to be dusted. It’s almost peaceful, until I realize that’s what’s left of someone’s home on the Volvo. Their house on our car.

I pull my shirt collar up to cover my nose and mouth, walking the other way into a rising red sun. I can stare directly at it-the light is filtering through as weak as if it’s already ebbed to afternoon strength. I get down the ramp and as far as the park before my eyes start to water, but I keep going anyway-I’ve got to get Alan to pull his head out of his ass and help me find out if my brother made it back to school in one piece. I’ll need backup when I find Liv today, but relying on Alan’s ability to detach himself from Nadia’s rebounding grip is probably asking too much. As I squelch through the park’s semi-irrigated grass, I try to think through every possible way my best friend could weasel out on me, but then I notice a girl dart out of a house up ahead on Santiago and begin her own dazed trek to school.

I used to be a real hotshot pilot in another life. A brilliant master of my stratospheric domain. A truly reptilian, crazed-genius fusion of Han Solo and Kara Thrace. In this life…well, I have a paralyzing fear of flight-but vague recollections in the deepest recesses of my lizard brain seem to confirm a glorious, hot-dogging chapter of my soul’s ancient history. It’s something I cling to desperately in the current frightful times, because everything else I remember is an ugly black hole of fear. I’ve always been afraid of something or other, as far back as I can remember. It’s shameful and embarrassing to admit, but eventually one has to face up to one’s inadequacies, because let’s be honest with each other here, man-we’ve all been in a scary, dark tunnel for a long time now, and I have certain concerns about the light everyone seems to be seeing these days.

I have always considered myself a sportsman, old boy. Not such a striking thing to admit, I’ll allow-but in the current age of crass exhibitionism and crude violence, the simple sportsmanship of big-game hunting does seem to still carry a certain cachet with the public imagination. As it should-and has, for many years, thanks to great men of the past-but of course, when I mention the word “hunting,” the unfortunate modern connotation is of half-wit archer-apes with cat scratch fever running around the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. However, those damn fools will have a long row to hoe before they do true damage to the hunting ideal, eh what? Quite.

I had always been good in a crisis. Siempre he aceptado el caos. I mean, I’m used to it by now-becoming el tranquilo ojo del huracán was essential en mi familia-pero esa día, Díos mio, was really pushing it. I had been taking turns at Lisa’s bedside with Mami, because the overdose and associated chingada of the previous twenty-four hours had calmed down enough for Miguel and Apá to go back to work at something like the normal time that morning. When mi hermano came to get me for my next shift, though, I couldn’t do it. The idea of spending another hour scared shitless and mumbling “ay cabrona, ¿cómo podría hacer esto?” to my unconscious sister when she still had those pinche tubes up her naríz was just too much, so I told Miguel I needed a break, and got the fuck out of there. I fled, just like the night of mi cumpleaños when things got too crazy.

It had been bastante fácil to float over to mi troquita and just drive wherever, away from the hospital parking lot and back home up El Camino Real, my head crammed with nine months of ugliness, and I knew that the only way to drain it was to tell somebody. So I called Roy-the one person who I thought I could count on for secrecy, if he could handle demasiadas revelaciones without cracking up-and dragged him up to the place where it all happened. Mi refugio, where the quiet and calm had always been so soothing, but had since become as oppressive as the July heat that was waiting for us both up there.  

“It’s a long, long way to the top-but when you come down, it’s one headlong rush.”

-David Lowery of Cracker

Gravity is working extra-hard on everybody these days, but for me, its extraordinarily powerful pull on the rabid wild animals of the financial industry makes Mr. Lowery’s quote strikingly appropriate. Jimmy Cliff said the same thing much better, of course, and it’s not like previous faux-flagellations of the super-rich have yielded any behavioral changes in terms of arrogance, entitlement, or narcissism (a Boesky or Milken here, a Madoff there), but since king-hell extravagance seems to be falling back out of style for the time being, it’s probably a good time to reflect on the mind-sets that got us to this point. When the worst is yet to come, we tend to dismiss the merely awful in tense anticipation of whatever ugliness may follow, but one of the most predictable episodes in the whole sorry saga of the President’s economic stimulus package was the temper tantrums and other spastic freakouts from Wall Street and the Republicans when they realized they weren’t getting all the props from Obama and Geithner that they’d paid for in 2008.

The inherently stupid hubris that afflicts all powerful people is truly an awesome thing to behold-especially once it begins to make their brains dissolve into warm muck, forcing them to flap their arms in panic and whimper like eunuchs on national television. We all got another good look at that phenomenon this week, of course, when the Gods of Karma claimed a further Democratic victim in the secretary-designate of Health and Human Services: Tom Daschle, whose prediliction for expensive automobiles and erudite drivers landed him deep in the freshly-dug Obama Transitional Ditch of Shame.  

Look, I’ve been as patient as the next guy when it comes to enduring the continual vile spew of this useless back-and-forth “debate” over who started what and who’s at fault and all the other bullshit associated with an illegal and immoral invasion. The facts are clear, and anyone who doesn’t know the history really needs to shut the fuck up and inform themselves before subjecting the rest of us to their thinly-veiled, slavish boosterism, no matter who they side with-the fascist oppressors and the maniacally dangerous rebels have both committed heinous sins. This is not a time to fall back on ignorance and favoritism, and clinging to well-worn shibboleths will only get your ass rocket-bombed in the end, dude. Fuck that. I won’t waste my love on a nation, and I suggest you pay attention, lest you continue to foolishly do so.