Get it On, Bang that Gong

“Always choose the educational option, or it will choose you.” Zelda del West


 The hag dies at the beginning of this story, which is not really the beginning, but rather a beginning and an end as well among many a beginning’s end. Where I begin the telling is a matter of preference, really. Time is not a line, but an ocean and I’m choosing the crystalline drop in which we find suspended a scene—a grandmotherly woman about to become a corpse. Hair colored red over gray, clothing a shot over the bow of tasteful. A look achievable only by a woman of a certain age taking pains at respectability on a budget. Dom Perignon wishes and caviar dreams, first sundered by the catastrophe of the world, then given free rein at the sale rack of TJ Maxx. Bohemia banished so far as can be achieved. Or as far as can be achieved with hair dyed that particular shade.

 We’re all fallen. It just takes a while to realize it. For some longer than for others. Maybe, it doesn’t matter. It happens one way or another. Ragged claws are an unavoidable eventuality. It’s coded in. The admixture for ecstasy. There is a dark lining to light. The universe pulsates. This is the great secret, so much so that revealing it changes nothing. All anyone wants is bullshit.

 She’s a woman of a certain age dressing the part of a doctor’s wife as that part is played in her imagination, but looking the part of a Baptist lady on her way to Sunday services with a passel of brats, which she knows from experience. She’s nervous about something. It would be hard to comprehend how she wouldn’t be, but her anxiety is vague and of unspecified origin. She’s living a love story with all of its concomitant rush and wave. Everything in her flutters with the thought. Him. Tango. Their sanctuary in one another. Not dragged by the world as they float in one another as medium. She’s a little fish swimming in the heart shaped pool inside his chest and he in her the same. Seeing all through the rosy swirling eddying thrum beating of that vessel. This what hearts are for. She doesn’t exactly word it like this. She’d frame it in more practical terms which I shall translate to metaphor because the road also goes that direction. I take this liberty wearing the mask of poet.

 She’s not fashionable. She’s not glamorous. She’s not well read. She’s not sophisticated. She’s not funny. Not intentionally. She’s not an intellect. She’s not fascinating. But love can make her all of this and more. This is what the drug is. She is more beautiful, fashionable, fascinating. In reality, somehow, because it casts a glamour. It’s a common spell. She still has no sense of humor. This isn’t just guesswork. I’ve seen the photos and the posts, gone over it in different directions through different media, captured the video feed, had the audio transcribed. I’ve put on a head with snakes for hair and seen through thousands of eyes gazing in ever-shifting directions. I have sources close to the primary parties both in the physical world and on the other side.

 I hope only that as the telling unfolds, the necessity of my attention to Rosetta’s actions will begin to make sense. I also don’t care if it does or not, because this is how the story goes and she deserves it told. She is my benefactress, and in recognition of her influence on my own life, I give hers my attention. This is how I honor the sacrifice she made. It’s been said that the most generous thing one can give another person is that—one’s undivided attention-- and honestly, I owe her that. Without her, I would never claim my birthright. While I’m a born witch, I am like everyone else in that I was also born lazy, loving ease over tribulation, but in the final analysis, it’s tribulation that can pay dividends if one survives and musters the courage to pick up the shattered bits of self and piece them back together. Breaking is not optional. An unbroken surface gives back a coherent reflection, which is illusory. Multiply. Girl, monster, weapon. I had already composed the myth. I didn’t understand the story I’d written. I believe I now do. Time, as they say. Shall tell. I strive to form myself the equal to my story. Such effort is a privilege.

 We’ll zoom in on this bit of time to an apartment in which this woman stands, looking very much like a stenographer who misplaced her reading glasses, in this, a piece of time that is her experience, held in space inside of a brick building of seven stories on the corner of Rose St. and Pomegranate Lane in the city of Portland in the carnivale year of our clown king. Omens portend strange. Omens at the time in which we see Rosetta have been portending strange for several months, so much so that one could believe the whole world slid sideways into an alternate reality but nobody noticed because they could still shop. That will change about the time the CERN people acknowledge that this alternate reality did in fact take up residence in our experience, though perhaps “slid sideways” will not be thought the most apt wording, but they can’t undo it, so we’d best prepare to surf the rising tides of chaos.

 Of course, people noticed strange happenings in the way that they usually do, but things were already so strange that the very word “strange” had lost all resonance with the events. This should tell you that the strange had been rising for a very long time. Longer than the collider had been in operation. The Hadron, was, itself a permutation of the strangetide. This was a time in which a clown apocalypse barely evoked a comment. It made the news and semi-news and celebrity news and fake news, alongside many other occurrences that may or may not have happened or may have happened in vastly different ways, or maybe even are now remembered differently.

There was that reality show where the main creature’s ass implant ruptured during the making of an “amateur” video. The video was leaked to the wilds of the internets at the end of the season. The creature, is, it is now agreed, a trans-galactic hologram from outside the Milky Way. The clowns started killing people the month before the kangaroo election. The clown king ran against robotic piñata head with googlie eyes. The piñata head was promising free injections of mind control horchata, which many thought was also nirvana. The clown king won but only by dropping a few anvils and pianos which he also refused to pay for because they were broken after somehow being dropped. Secret agents smoked strange smelling cigarettes in dark alleys. There were UFO sightings from Tulsa to Portland to Constantanople. The fortuneteller said things that will be studiously ignored until we collectively find ourselves, like Orson Welles at the end of Touch of Evil, before Marlene Dietrich, who says through her face as Delphic oracle: “your future’s all used up.” This is the ecosystem we find ourselves in.

 It probably isn’t that things are any stranger than they ever really have been. The world changes when one notices the world. Some mirrors are better than others. The building Rosetta lives in has an easily deconstructed façade, owing to the fact that is has, at irregular intervals, to be deconstructed and reconstructed to allow ingress and egress at every one of its ten floors depending upon which is at street level. Currently the building has been eight stories for over a year. Fractional measurements suggest that it will soon become seven, so first floor leases are not being renewed unless the tenants are clearly interested in living underground. That is not for the timid since the parts that are underground are in fact in a different dimension during this time and inaccessible, inescapable. The original first floor hasn’t been this side in decades. One wonders what’s become of the three tenants who opted to stay. The above ground adjustment isn’t as much trouble as it would seem.

The façade is a marvel of efficient deconstruction and reconstruction. Other than that little changes besides having to re-number all of the apartments or embrace an alternative numerical scheme. The management has this down to a science, except for the problems with deliveries, which are a never-ending annoyance.

 Seventh floor apartment, maybe soon to be sixth, the bedroom windows allowing a street view of Rose. It’s a beautiful day, with not a cloud in sight and Rosetta Myxini, aged 65, enters the room with the faux tile wall treatment which used to be faux Delftware with a design in cobalt blue on a white ground that was appropriated from a 17th century Dutch vase depicting a Japanese lady walking in a garden. The faux tile design had been printed on a high density fiber board and then coated with polyurethane laminate for durability, which had largely expired by the time she rented the apartment, so she bought some oil based Kilz paint and transformed it to semi-gloss atomic white because that paint will cover anything. The most ill-advised color schemes and worse sins have been known to disappear with the pass of a paint roller soaked in this miraculous paint and primer in one, just as the scarred and filthy faux tile disappeared to become radiant white. It became a room for white fur and white birds and white noise and lilies. Lots of lilies. She’s not finished the decorating, but lilies are what this room is for, at least secondarily. She’s wearing Ultraviolet by Paco Rabanne. It’s a light oriental with floral notes atop an exotic base of vanilla and amber. Details matter. It’s been written of this perfume: “the bathrooms in Hell smell like this.” White Linen might have been the more obvious choice, but these accidental selections are rarely so accidental. Wear good perfume. Scent is the longest lingering and triggering memory.

 I here mark that Rosetta is tasking herself, and tasked with, an act of self-reinvention. This is a feat, always beginning in the imagination and difficult to kindle in the muck in which we find ourselves rooting. This is art, inviolate. Acts of self-reinvention are sacred. They are always heroic quests and they always require some form of bravery to begin and sacrifice as the first step. Fail to understand this, and you may as well not have existed. Every act of self-reinvention demands a measure of respect. Every single one is a story to be examined for what it reveals. This is gravity it is due. Clarity. Detail. This is attention. Which is not to say that they never go wrong. They usually do. They are usually entirely misguided. But the inclination is still the best thing we’ve got. Sun barges through the windows further heightening the icy glare of the space, at the center of which stands a queen four poster reproduction Queen Anne bed in white with gold accents. It’s made up with black satin sheets, a fitted and a flat sheet. No more. There is a matching nightstand on each side of the bed. The light cancelling curtains are black to match the sheets. She won’t draw them closed until the doctor arrives.