Way before all that: existed (exists!) a geological bounty, a cavern of snakes, spiders, rocks and bats, bones most likely! Buddha wall-impressions, mold like cotton, and all the dank drippings a cavern of this sort has to offer...
Yet perhaps no more real/less real than Central Plaza Super Mall, supper mal, sniper mail, slightly male, knightly snail, itself...
Entering this cave yesterday from the early morning mist of Thailand's lush altitude, hearing only the quiet squeaking of thousands of bats fluttering above, peace and isolation descended upon me, or I into it, and my stroll through Earth's depth left me awestruck wondrous love, and thirsting for more geology...
...that which gives life:
On the trail again, friends! The trail that provides, that always does provide, yaas, the same trail, be it through Appalachia or Southern Thailand's jungles, that generous pathway, always enough and never in excess, like a garden who's zucchinis will complement your pasta but don't grow big enough to be baked into bread...
I walked through level upon level of rushing water, even letting some of it bathe me, and then: smack wham BOOM life again loneliness emptiness worthlessness comes at you like a 1000 mile an hour freight train skidding up the coast--and just when your world seems balanced, maybe not perfect but at least easeful in spite of all this dis-ease, the feeling that in the end all we have is this body and it is desolate and separate, that same thought UNTRUE THOUGHTS but real thoughts that dissect humanity, causing us to suffer, our false perceptions like tendrils splicing The Trail into negatives all too often developed into colored prints, distorted arrows rearranging order and harmony, union...
This feeling sticks with you--me. Into the evening, compelling you, me, us to go on what we can playfully dub a Cake Mission, to the Cake Store (caught by the neighbors too!), to buy Cake, and a good deal of ice cream to go with it--but ah, even we must permit aberrations, no!?--and make a big old pot of tea and get into bed, turn up the noise and slip into frigid North American landscapes, the home of Paul Bunyan to be precise (ok, fuck, yes, I ate a pint of ice cream and watched Fargo alone at 7:30 on a Saturday night 'cause I felt the Great Emptiness, so sue me)...
(At some point in the night Jif and spoons, well just 1 spoon actually, entered the equation. Yaaaaaaaas).
...and the feeling persists my friends and colleagues, you, the receivers of these words, which are truly just products of the empty spaces between silence and home, inter-tonal vibrations within the notes of a reed flute...these words, the taxis of emotion requiring us to give in to the unavoidable relatability of one living being to the next...for what else do we need to connect other than the experience of living?
Fuck! Ok, yes, so I awoke still feeling kinda yucky, and throwing on my best Polo I sauntered out the door at 7 am to go golfing with my boss. That's right--king shit.
On a military base. During a coup. Knocking divots in the green, catching glimpses of generals in I Love New York t-shirts (hell, these guys don't seem so bad), sipping ice cold water on a misty Eastern golf course after a night of rain, and just trying to put balls in holes, all we're ever really trying to do, isn't it though eh?
And here enters Central Plaza (pursued by a bear), perhaps the biggest ball of them all, can it fit into the hole I'm trying to fill? Oh too easily--for it only disintegrates upon entrance and woosh! out the other side like the mere apparition it is, this Super Mall, Snooper Hall, Stupid BALL scruples n' all...
Right. Central Plaza. First some herbs to soften the stools, because, you understand, my lower intestines often feel like they're perpetually paper cut--''If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even—for that is the seat of sympathy—he forthwith sets about reforming—the world.''--thank you Henry David! And into the jangling intestines of this city's streets, thinking "oh yes I'll find this monstrosity! Directions, or even any remote inkling of a hunch on where this place is, will only throw me off!" Hubris, my friends. Hubris.
And as Achilles and Oedipus and the rest of my predecessors--ha! talk about ego! But really, don't we all simply precede each other, or perhaps revolve, yes! revolutions, circles--accompanied by, including, as it were, reformations--I stumbled blindly into danger's way searching for a Holy Grail...
Wait a minute, fuck, Holy Grail? No, we were talking about Greece here not King Arthur...fuck, this boy must have an ENGLISH DEGREE and clearly a flare for the dramatic, because danger?? No. Let's be more accurate and call it "getting lost." Driving aimlessly, I mean without any basis whatsoever for where I ought to be going, down unpaved sidestreets until I re-entered the jungle, ended up at one too many dead-ends, and decided to let that hubris rest--and it wasn't thumos that was gonna get me outta this one, no, but instead, metis....ah, that's better!
And could Odysseus be called heroic if he had a smart phone?
Shit man, Google Maps are just part of the illusion though--yes. Offering us a version of "objectivity" only portraying non-existent establishments like Central Plaza??
A VERSION of objectivity??? Excuse me???
When I saw that billboard--"CENTRAL FUCKING PLAZA HOME OF NON-EXISTENT NOTHINGNESS"...Lord! I finally stopped muttering to myself and began to smile. I didn't even need to go to the damn mall. I just wanted to find it.
They have strategically placed a McDonald's at the entrance for people like me in states such as this. And let me tell you--a cheeseburger is a cheeseburger my friends. Those people have it down--what mastery of replication (by the way, so does KFC I discovered 15 minutes later).
What I learned after the burger, the fried chicken, the chocolate croissant, and the ice cream cone, upon descending the steps of the mall that doesn't exist--
nothing.
We all knew how this story would end--ye olde lattice cherry pie, no doubt--"the holes that makes us whole"--the wholes that make us hole!!--such ingrained knowledge, holy as a sponge, wringing itself all over my self, always, yes, nothing knew here folks, no grand finale or realization, it was all there, and all never there, just like Central Plaza and the rest of existence...!
Just gonna quietly slip into evening's oblivion, again and again.
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