THE WRATH OF GOD

I've dug before, and shoveled concrete. Once Tim and I worked for an Iraqi owned construction outfit in Portland, and our boss was a black ex-army corps of engineers guy said he built bridges in Ecuador, or some shit. We lasted longer than he did, and Tim ended up with his tools. The guy was a hard worker, but a drunk, and he lived in one of the drunks' residential hotels in downtown Portland. We had tried to give the guy his tools back. Tim was a carpenter, so he did that, but I was a laborer. That was along time ago. Today, now laid off, or fired from my tiresome job for playing ping pong when there was no actual work to do anyway, I began digging up the horrible heavy thick unsightly iron ac condensation drain at the back of the patio block after I finally got some Mexican family to clear out all the weeds and Chinese trees and legacy yuccas still in Spring bloom. Their name was Aguirre' like the movie with Klaus Kinski. It wasn't so bad till I got down to the yellow clay, and the brown clay which are really more like glue, or evil, than dirt. Even with a high pressure water hose, I had to use a paint scraper to free the pry bar of the viscous goo, then later threw up some loose PVC to do the job and get the incessant drip away from the walls of the garage buried half way up with gurf. Just like my skull is a garage for my brain, and buried up halfway with gurf. There I was under the gaze of the screeching young cardinal bird with my arm up to my elbow in a slovenly hole of clay. Having took a short-handled one pound sledge and busted the thing off by the root, I reached down into the hole to get a slick of goo to sniff and see if it was tied into the grey water of the house. No shit, just the bare hips of the dinosaurian accretozome. I buried the long turd of bird squirrel hair whateveritwas, veritas, from the drain pipe, and took a shower. I imagine playing ping-pong on a stone table with Klaus Kinski and we're both dressed like rusty clay soiled conquistadores. The paddles have that Aztec gorgon face on them, and the ball is the sun, and maybe we're like some kind of underworld twins, and the ping pong ball is the head of a little monkey. Maybe it's the head of Long Vang, the other guy they fired, a Chinese Viet, a boat person forty years on. Somewhere, I like it when Werner Herzog talks about the jungle being hell, the earth too, and all of language and animal sound nothing more than a cry of agony in the face of terror. That life itself is only terror, horror, anguish, and blunt stupidity. And all of us, just killing time. I broke one smaller hammer today.

"God" by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven as photographed by Morton Schamberg