The heartland just misses the eerieness of the plains and the oozy Bible-infused sweat of the South... so there's a sense of safety among the corn, not Children-of-the-Corn but plainness and goodness, popcorn or something. Yes, popcorn around a fire, or better yet in a movie theater all buttery or a suburban house where everyone is watching TV on the sofa together. I'm thinking most of Indiana and Ohio, Missouri maybe, Illinois... These nice, safe places, where the flickering blue screen has replaced the communal campfire. It could be anywhere in America. It is anywhere in America. Dollar General store has not yet turned it into a third-world country, and its secrets remain hidden under the well-irrigated fields and well-groomed suburban streets and orderly cities, I will not reveal them.
field notes: somewhere in the heartland, with the gypsies, july 2005
field notes: missouri rainbow gathering, 18 may 2004
She breaks camp in a Missouri lowland, found a fire to warm by. Hollow eyes speculate, lackidasically, about how to score some nugs: but lack the enthusiasm to go manifest them. She sits by the dying coals until the night reaches its depths, just listening, and then creeps back to her tent.
Drumming
*
left there in the morning, tired and a bit agitated at the vapidness of that entire counterculture (and for once in my life, i was going into the whole rainbow thing happy and positive). our theory was to find a small town to drink coffee in and read and just kind of relax on the village green. we went to lebanon, missouri, which seemed to be nothing but strip mall sprawl; we went to doolittle, which was a ghosttown (but you could rent the city hall); we went to rolla, which was a university town but equally vacant and dead. there's just nothing in these places. lawrence kansas allayed my fears temporarily about the plague of vacancy, but my fears have returned overnight: america's towns are dying by degrees; people notice and yet they don't associate it as a systemic phenomenon...
back to the map
crickets
WE LOVE YOU
drumming
laughter
then, WE GOT COFFEE
COME ON ALL YOU SLEEPING PEOPLE
WAKE UP WE GOT COFFEE
checks indiglo clock: glowing blue 12:52
1:37 WE GOT COFFEE
2:16 COFFEE
3:55 COME ON YOU DIDN'T THINK WE FELL ASLEEP DID YOU
WE GOT YOUR HOT COFFEE
4:19 WAKE UP COFFEE
5:32, and the light is, might be, graying
stepping out into sleep-steeped mists, she
winds her way among the pines and
FREE COFFEE ENEMAS
follows the shouts to Nacho Mama's,
where two men are standing with cardboard-fashioned megaphones
"i came for the free coffee enema"
"well mama, step right up" laughter
"no not really" pauses
"mama you look down"
"you need some coffee"
"yeah, i'm sad... no, i don’Äôt want any coffee"
"i'm sad because there's all these mamas with little children trying to sleep and i feel
like it's kind of inconsiderate, you know, disrespecting the rainbow spirit"
she's become conservative.
she tries again
to say something about how can people live in anarchy without a code of mutual respect,
about how lawlessness only works when there's a culture of communal agreement,
but she's lost it, the jumbled words,
"listen sister, I've been here since seed camp
I made this gathering happen and tonight's my last night
and I just have to rage a little
hollerin's good medicine
want to have a holler?"
he passes the cardboard tube to her, she weighs
the power and declines,
slips back through the tatters,
around the stumbling morning zombies
of first rainbow light