barking heads

[mnaz]

Motel rooms are dicey, especially the "rustic" ones without a corporate logo out front, places for fugitives on the lam, always packing a handgun and large cash, some drugs and assault rifles stashed close. Rob the mob and disappear. No, that's Vegas. Or a movie. A thousand movies. No, in reality domestic war is the biggest threat, the tattooed couples who rent these tattered rooms month after month and fight like hell about how to escape. It spills into the parking lot.

No, that's not it either. The biggest danger is the screen. The wire. Other drawbacks of tumbleweed lodging pose little trouble, the stained walls and sloping floors, the tobacco stench and occasional roach, the plastic flags . . . parts of the odyssey. You need only a working wall fan and a place to be unconscious, and soon stale reek will fade. But the screen . . . not much you can do with it. Tales of free will murder ooze from a screen inflamed by a beat-up cable box until it's jammed with barking heads who decry any lapse in the war as treason, and you're strung out on their clipped cadence after a whiskey-rocks. You keep watching because it has to get better.

Once you succumb to the wire you fall quickly from high desert, from a quiet corner of the sagebrush kingdom to jumpy shadows on a wall and rapid rabid punditry like semiautomatic fire in a Strip liquor store hit. It could be any of those derelict motels on old 95 gripped by a cable tentacle, don't remember which, just down Main Street from the Nugget reader-board. "America, our prayers are with you . . . Check out our new slots." And every screen is preset to FOX or CNN and those damned scrolling tickers below. You were fooled once when the screen woke to desert mountains in morning splendor. Until the camera pulled back to a line of troops on their way to exterminate the enemy. Stock and gas prices scrolled.

But you're used to it. Barking heads fade in and out of your dreams . . . like the time you climbed the St. Louis arch over a pleasant orange swirl, and a jagged Z-flash patched in, a-burst with the issues. You watch them speak. Their foreheads turn red and lips move as hummingbird wings. You hang on their every word of redemption and waste a gentle buzz. You keep watching because it has to get better.

[stilltrucking]

Thank you for writing. I feel better after reading that. Not sure why, probably because you put words to what I could not. Or maybe just because I found pleasure in reading it.

[mnaz]

thanks jack. this is actually an old write of mine, as you might recognize, but it's been in need of some serious editing for years. i think i'm satisfied with it now...

[creativesoul]

i love the motel opening, and i want more- as i did before- 'what i mean is that -it is really an excellant write'.. aloha