*Gunfire Lullaby

CNN: my gunfire lullaby. Snippets of fragments from the world-at-large mesh with belligerent voices from the street, waft through the window, snake under my bed, and into my dreams. A cavalcade of pageantry—the American celebration, featuring the whitebread teenybopper pop phenom, a scrubbed visage from the sun-kissed wasteland. Her insistent Republican gloss spurs a reaction at the awards show, a loud boo-hiss . . . The atonal Japanese band is waylaid and I feel the knife, the pummeling—blow for blow and thrust for thrust, in tactile lockstep with the subplot . . . More violence. Gangs of looters selling magazines on the street. I conk a guy with a toaster but he doesn't wince, so I catch up with my boys. I'm a rugged sort . . . A weird hybrid of Kiss and action films, lots of torso shots, writhing and leather-bedecked, gnashing to a bubblegum din, great heaping tubs of food backstage, an interview with the bandleader about how he was discovered, going crazy at a show with lots of flash and vigor . . . pan, wipe, zoom—vaudeville, superheroes, cartoons, childhood parties, an odd carousel . . . old faces morph into amalgams of the vaguely familiar and deeply unknowable . . . tapping the mother lode, a strange inner life, explosion from lethargy, farewell to sloth and jaded demise . . . military actions, storms of confetti, hounded by reporters; a dismal place with unmarked train cars . . . the chanteuse and the telerobic instructor battle each other for my affections in front of a childhood sweetheart's house . . . true love and populism triumph over cigar chomping plutocrats . . . Manson Family offspring, now young adults, discuss career plans . . . an emaciated crack whore with the face of Marcia Brady screams obscenities in guttural Spanish . . . RRRRRRing.

* Initial post for this blog