Echo, reverb..

[mnaz]

Three ridges might be too far. The road is toilsome, of little comfort. I can't hear it. So I slip in an old dub tape to ease the sound barrier.... fading reverb drifts out, bounces off ridges, fills up the land, lays out the land, side to side-- earth to echo, and back. Muffled desert gold. I go back to humbler times when King Tubby made reverb into a portal, from a Jamaican ghetto, using a battered four-track machine and improvised spare parts. Materials at hand.

I misjudged the horizon and I'm left with dull granite.... and reverb.... on a stripped bedrock rhythm which animates drab slabs and moves me farther out. Tubby spared few lyrics in the mix, rooted in separation, and I steal them.... "Going to Africa.... Africa to-mor-row".... stolen repatriation, into Nevada dust. But I take only what I need, from the rootsman in his dread chambers-- faith tested by barren earth, stripped to soft dub thunder, affirmed by a long view, where despair wrote of faith in a massive earth rhythm, the kind Glen Brown wrote in self-defense. His songs attack me.

They fit, on this sweep of obliteration and heat. Not a cactus to be found; only dwarf creosote, spaced well apart. Lack of color and definition is striking. Fringe existence. When I first went there I sought barren earth-- its punishment, if necessary-- because I was in a similar state. Confession time. The planet should be more honest. I should mock my own good posture. That vision may have set me adrift; I thirst after it.

Thinking back, Sly Stone also wrote of thirst.... He came to seek barren earth.... "You have turned into a prayer.... I can feel I'm almost there.... closer, closer to the top.... lookin' down is quite a drop".... Majestic dead-end. Temporary refuge. He wrote of love for all those years, but it's never that simple. Sly wrote of a dogged trail under the powerlines, insane from the heat, buried in Ward Valley's colorless, unstable curves, the ones I imagined when I heard the song, the ones I've yet to touch. But they're only words, and your guess is better than mine. And colorless slopes stand on their own art, regardless of my attachments. And the sun is out today.

[dadio]

Very good prose story.