Steely Mammoths

[Nazz]

In the age of steely mammoths, behemoths with beepers back out of jumbo Box-Mart parking slots and trundle across the freshly asphalted desert. They have miles of leather and bulging bodies like steel hillocks. They have chrome like mad dinosaur teeth and flip-down screens. They are not docile creatures bred for some coffee shop fern fest; they are powerful, gluttonous gladiators with rugged, heavy frames, bent on conquering stoplight grids and grocery itineraries. We won the cold war so we get the hot wars and big boxes, the plastic slide and chrome teeth. It’s a limited time offer; act now. Our time is now!

Shiny mammoths thrive in Southwestern towns, in desert heat and dust, though dust has never been observed on a mammoth. The search continues. Double garages and 24-inch alloy wheels go on forever, but dry hills run farther still. It’s possible a desert guru may have ridden one of these beasts, but most scientists believe such a guru would live in some place like Devil’s Playground in a beat-down 1956 trailer with round edges and a cache of machine guns, snakeskin hats and citrus juice, a telescope trained on Ursa’s suspicious neighbors, a radio tuned to Art Bell’s paranormal wanderings, and a boneyard full of spent swamp cooler and ham radio parts. If the mammoth crossed his mind at all, it would be concern over the coming chrome shortage.

The guru would dab skin cream to his sandpaper complexion, and his hair would grow wild and splintered in the time between buckboard trips to town, but don’t classify him as a longhaired pop mystic. The mystics are on LSD, bent over and chanting up Sun, he would say, and they got lucky a few billion years ago. But Sun is angry over the desert and wobbles in stringy gravity tossed weakly by lesser heavenly bodies, he would say. Sun needs no coaxing. He might have rickety photo albums of Space Age motels and art deco gas pumps from the pre-stucco era. It’s possible a desert guru has never had a good look at a mammoth, except whooshing by on Interstate 40.

But it’s all speculation. It’s also possible the guru may have a stable of mammoths stashed away in dust bowl dregs of Pahrump, and he may drink vodka, steal cable, and watch Bill O’Reilly’s forehead swell every night. Science will continue to look for the answers. For now mammoths graze on subdivisions and look for places to drill. Nothing urgent yet. They have a lot of cupholders and flip-down screens. Someday they'll virtually venture out, but will they taste dust?

[mtmynd]

blame it all on detroit
using up all that steel
and thunder exhausts
leaving little for the rest
of us peasants in japanese
cars that go further for less
with the efficiency that now
poses problems for behemoths
that ran wild out of control
across the landscape of america
... their extinction is imminent
like the dinosaurs of old, their bones
will remain as memories for future
generations seeking their answers.


good write with many great lines tossed in like chile flakes to smack attention up side of the head.

keep 'em coming, nazz... clear your mind.

[Yejun]

Good read.

What about archaeologists or anthropologists (?) instead of scientists?

[Nazz]

Good comment, Yejun. I actually thought about that. I might change it. Thanks for reading, and I'm glad you enjoyed.

Hey Cec... yeah, I had to get the "dinosaur" aspect in somehow, so I wrote it into the "chrome" (grills, etc.) haha. Hard to believe how much bigger and bigger so many of these rigs became-- even the Japanese rigs.

Of course the danger with this topic is that it's, well... such an obvious target. But someone has to do it once in a while.

It was interesting to read up on Art Bell for this piece... quite a fascinating overnight radio show he had going for years and years (unfortunately, can't catch it now-- he retired in 2007) He talked about all kinds of stuff-- UFO's, unexplained phenomena, etc. I found a list of milestone calls from listeners catalogued on one site, and one guy called in from some far-flung territory in March, '05 to report on a secret US weapons program-- some sort of super-selective "tactical nuke" or something, and a voice in the background suddenly interrupted the call with "terminate the call on line 6" or something like that.... what a weird trip.

Anyways...

[SmileGRL]

mr. nazzy...this was a trip like a portrait enjoyed