Drive-Thru LA-- Paula

“The first step in the elevation of women under all systems of religion is to convince them that the great Spirit of the Universe is in no way responsible for any of these absurdities.”“1

- Elizabeth Cady Stanton2

Before a word was spoken in the car, la lingua d’amore was already buzzing through the air at an unknown frequency. The speed of sound had been discovered and recorded. The speed of love’s language was probably much greater, but impossible (assumptively too powerful) to measure.  To measure something, first you have to contain it; put it in the experimental element.  This is impossible with love. Love cannot be bound up, predicted, circumscribed and defined; which may be the primary reason for its lasting power. You go in thinking you know what you’re looking for, but what you find is something you can’t take and put in any museum for people to look at.  Love is alive because people haven’t been able to pin it down and fossilize it yet. Love is not constant, Love adapts.3

Maybe it was Francisco’s foreign nature that attracted Paula to him.  In turn, he was immediately taken in by her peroxide-striped hair– there was a bit of tiger in her that he knew was waiting to come out.  They locked peripheral vision, and both of their faces fluctuated between sheepish grin and flirtatious embarrassment for the first twenty minutes or so.  Carpenter was relatively quiet, and didn’t put forth his usual effort towards mentioning every corn stalk of Americana along the way.  The setting sun helped matters, and once night fell, the silence fell upon them with the moon’s rays.4

Mary was somewhat happy for the silence, and quickly went to sleep. Jesse knew well why his Father was being so quiet, but knew that talking about it right then was not the right time, nor the right place.  He leaned his head forward into his lap and tried uselessly to go to sleep with his face in his palms.   5

As for Paula and Francisco, they could care less about words or sleep at this point.  La lingua d’amore had drowned out any logos to them. They knew not words– or they knew not the words to define their emotion.6

This was the problem with definition– definition implies containment. People refused to believe that their love could be contained by any definition. Self-definition was the sole basis on which Love rested for eternity.  Everyone was assumed to know what love was– acts of love could always be misconstrued or interpreted to satisfy an agenda.  But Love! O, Capital “L” Love– what was it? And how could I have been left out of the loop which allows for the realization of the undefinable? They say we realize the undefinable when we die. In the great literate cock-tale party of life, we can simply say “129” to a buddy and chuckle together, knowing that we will be able to define Love once we die.7

But Paula had yet to die– and Francisco, well, had died in a sense before, but had not died forever.  He had merely gotten a glimpse of death and returned a scarred human being.  No longer the innocent dreamer of his youth, in truth, Francisco was involved in things that mentioned here would get me ostracized and portrayed as ethnocentric.  He was an illegal alien.  But what the hell did that mean?  He didn’t know what a social contract was.  Was that even the basis of citizenship?8

According to said theory, Francisco et al were the property of God.  They were all his devices in the Natural way of things, and they had to respect each and every individual as equals under the creator. But across state lines, the social-contract theory was negated multiple times by actual events where the obvious moral choice was to take away others rights; namely their right to be free of bullet wounds.9

Francisco was no stranger to wounds– but the physical horror is not something unknown, so further description here would be banal. He had his share of scars, something which he thought defined him from the average person.  They did in a way, but not necessarily the way he thought they would.  Scars are always curiously fascinating to people, but they are equally repulsing by the same measure which makes them fascinating.  Scars are different.  Well, people are different as well. Who ever said mathematical signs had anything to do with people?  I see their point and intentions, but frankly their optimism is what holds society together sometimes. 10

So what if it all falls down? Or when? This question riddled not Paula.  She was more interested in what shoes Carrie was wearing, or who was getting divorced on B! True Hollywood Losers!  Art was something Paula thought came packaged. She understood nothing of redefining aesthetic space.  Her ability to critically analyze texts was even worse. She wanted it all spoon fed to her one tear and heartbreak at a time.  To write the ultimate novel for Paula and those who read like her, one would need do no more than bust a melodramatic ejaculation of idiocy.11

But all that aside, she was in Love with Francisco, and they had yet to speak.  None of the Carpenters knew Spanish.  None of the Jameses did either, for that matter.  So the silence from St. Francis to Santa Fe was not Golden.  The silence was tense, unfamiliar, brooding– listless. It was the most boring God-damned car ride I’ve ever been on (note: probably the most boring in automobile history).  But for Paula, it was amazing. She teased Francisco with the flipping of hair and he would always return to the same expression; one eyebrow slightly raised, then letting his teeth peek through and finally smiling and busting into a giggle, and like a broken record, played the cheesiest twelve seconds of a love ballad and then repeated the pain for anyone within earshot.  They did this for literally six fucking hours, and you could see why I got a little impatient and even angry.  There is a tension in the words that is not in accord with the standard modes of satirical conduct. I was getting tangled up in all of this.12

The car rolled into Santa Fe as the sun was coming up and I thanked myself for ending such a gamy little trip after little rumination. The gaminess was all in the eye work though, the subtle hints that meat would soon be fouled indeed. At this point, Francisco was home free and established himself as an official bi-linguist.13

“Thank you,” he said, with little or none of the complication he had exhibited in St. Francis.  Jesse looked at him with the philosopher’s brow.  His eyes quickly shot inward and questioned himself– how could he have been fooled?  He was a college student, after all, who had taken two years of Spanish. He learned all about romance languages; dialects, accents, the difference between native speakers and foreign speakers, formal versus informal– all of it! And now it was clear to him that he had been duped.14

“Why, no problem boy,” Carpenter said.  Apparently he hadn’t noticed the difference.  His first reaction to a thank you was to oblige with a humble response, and that is exactly what he did.  Jesse knew his father would explode if he knew Francisco had lied.  Had he lied? Or did he just play the cards he needed to in order to get back to Santa Fe?15

“So, you’re going to the mission now?” Jesse asked.  Francisco realized that Jesse was no longer speaking slow and syllabic for him, and almost blew his cool.16

“Si, for the hongry,” Francisco responded, resuming his broken English.17

“Well, you think we could come and give a helping hand tonight?  We’re only here for the night, but could probably lend a hand if you need help cooking, I can cook anything you need cooked I tell you– soups, pies, stews, roasts, corn sixteen ways to Sunday,” Mary said, noting that her opportunities to speak were few and far between, jammed as much as she could into one speech act.  Francisco seemed a little rattled. 18

“Where is it at boy?” pressed Carpenter.19

“Mi oncle knows where, an I meet him today at casa,” Francisco said, breaking his English to the point where anyone who knew anything could tell he was faking.  Carpenter didn’t feel the need to involve himself in the community, since his last attempt to do so outside of Someplace proved to be nothing but trouble.  20

“Alright boy, then get on over to your Oncle’s house, I’m sure he’s pretty worried about ya,” Carpenter said trying to communicate with Francisco.  Francisco took offense to it at the time, but after all– he was the one faking it in the first place.  Everyone was faking it.  What was “real” spoken language?21

With reading comes the ability to dictate pace.  But also with reading comes the instant ability to distort the central message.  With speech, people receive a message by putting together all of the signals that you put out into a somewhat uniform pattern and decode from that pattern meaning which you imbue through association.  Depending on the situation, they could ask you to repeat something, or speed up, or slow down, but the greatest orators were known for speaking without interruption.  But the best orators, with all of their power, wholly depend on writing, for though impromptu speech is a venerable quality in the world of oration, prepared and polished message is exalted as king of spoken word.  Which begs the question: are speech writers speaking, or writing?22

There is definitely a different dimension to texts than conversations, but the great speeches, the ones we remember and read for centuries afterwards– were written first.  The written words last longer– before the audiotape and moving picture were invented (then later assimilated) the speeches that weren’t written were more about the central message than anything. How could someone have attended an oration on the welfare of Rome given by Augustine and remembered his deft wordplay and punning?  Or was punning even practiced in his day? Yes, equivocation was on everyone’s mind at the time. They were rational, they could make ratios. But would they remember every phrase, and more importantly all of the associations which the phrase or word carried? Would it translate into something we could understand, or would we think they were talking about Kaisers in Eromma? 23

Well, you could for instance cite Duke Theseus’ speech on the Prima Mobili, but those fools who set logic and rationality on a pedestal must have known they would come back to bite them in the ass eventually, primarily and most importantly the Fallacy of Equivocation.  24

Because, by logic and rationality we can infer that the universe must have had a beginning, then people have called the origin, or first mover “God”.  What they don’t know is that in doing so, they’re foregoing the fundamental possibility that time doesn’t exist as we know it, and implying that there is such thing as a “beginning and end” to all things.  Our own finiteness leads us to believe all things have a beginning and end, including the physical universe which is the sum of all physical matter in this plane of existence.  Now tell me where the second plane of ethereal existence was born in people’s minds? They looked up to the sky and saw the stars, and thought they were angels shining down from heaven.  Others saw the sun and thanked it for blessing them with the ability to grow food. Others prayed to the rain to come and water their crops so they wouldn’t starve. They all looked to the sky, and now we know what is out there. 25

We know now that the sun is a huge hydrogen bomb that heats the planet Earth to a specific temperature which fosters the presence of water in liquid form, or H2O, in cyclical condensation and precipitation patterns that create streams and rivers which run into reservoirs, seas, and primarily oceans, which contain a great deal of sodium chloride (which allow the oceans to remain liquid at much lower temperatures than desalinated water, which freezes at Zero Degrees Celsius).  The oceans are able to stabilize the temperature of the planet Earth, which in turn supports life forms primarily composed of eleven elements.  These life forms at some point in their history, either by chance or environment, started to pick things up in their hands. They used these objects to perform various tasks which made the hunting and gathering of food more profitable, and they used pots and other devices to hold water, which they quickly found out that they needed to survive.  Of course, they also made tools to kill each other, and soon tools became pyramid– they started building on one another, combining ideas and years of testing, re-invention, strengths and weaknesses. People learned from those who came before them how to make all the tools that had come before that were still useful, and then the next people assimilated what their genitors knew and then used their lives to make more tools. . .26

This was the cause and effect of invention, which could be clearly illustrated by any agnostic professor of Anthropology at even the Community College level.  Most serious anthropology was kept out of the K-12 program for the fear that Western Civilization would be criminalized in the whole affair, but those who wished to know the truth about human history had do no more than look at what people reconstructed from a few bones and pots buried a couple hundred feet under the mud, or hidden in a cave, or frozen beneath twenty feet of ice somewhere. These were the secrets of humanity, in the brain functions that differentiated Neanderthal from Cro-Magnon and those from Homo Erectus.  The difference is a biological gap that they trace like maniacs– in a quest to see who had the best chances of survival in this crazy fucking world.27

It turned out that the tribes which thrived were those able to develop rudimentary tools that allowed them to become more than just a bag of bones.  But then they did something crazy. They painted a picture of what they killed on a wall and it changed things forever. I really don’t think much of this is relevant for how we should go about living now, so enough already. The past is done, but we can see clearly that tools gave us the ability to establish a race, called “humans” now (by most who speak English), which grows in knowledge and ability progressively through education and innovation.   28

The question that remains is this: When was Love invented?  Well, technically, to be invented, something must be defined. A rock exists. If tomorrow I call it a Shandar and say it is a work of art that represents the struggle against the essential degeneration of things overt time, I could probably get paid for it, but I wouldn’t say I invented the Shandar. The rock existed. I just changed the meaning of it by inventing the idea of the Shandar.  I re-defined the rock.  Some idiot did this before and made a million dollars at least.  The thing is, how long will you call it a Shandar?  Or will anyone even believe that a rock is a Shandar in the first place? What if they realize right away that a rock is just a rock?  Well, that is where the smoke and mirrors come in.  We give meaning to things.  Who is to say a bunch of paint on a canvas is priceless? Oh, it is a woman with a smug little grin and greasy black hair. Wonderful! (Applause)  I know that fires care not for great art, nor earthquakes or volcanos. Actually, those natural bandits, along with the not so natural kind seemed to have quite a taste for seeking out art and destroying it (in the middle ages especially), but that is beyond the scope of the tale here. All encompassing– this defines the Universe, not God.29

The same is true with love. Love is the need for attention and a show of affection coupled with the will to protect the subject of your “a” words.  This is the thing: babies need love. Unloved babies die.  We were all babies once, maybe we don’t remember– quite frankly I think we purposefully cannot remember, strictly because we understand things through a different language at that age.  Expression is paramount to all other forms of human art when it comes to satisfying a baby’s need for attention. They need smiles and hugs and they need to suck on their mother’s nipple– wait, what?  This is the one argument for intelligent design that I really have no problem with. (As opposed to the male nipple argument against design.) Frankly, I think it would be a little better than the American obsession with the cow’s teat. We’re people, remember?  But to eat ourselves would be cannibals, so logically, ingesting cow milk is as “natural” as distilling milk from beans. But go and do as you please, our guts are tough as goats’ if we condition them enough to a certain substance.30

But enough with the telling and pedagogy, that is what the struggle is against in the first place.  The telling is a mode in which we offer a viewpoint, but in sharing a story there is a sense of reciprocity.  Reciprocity is what makes us “us” instead of a bunch of “I’s”.  31

Carpenter and his family are not us, but people we get to look upon, to view their life and see them do things that real people do.  They were sitting in fake Santa Fe, about to leave Francisco, who would wander off into the evening and find some muchachos to hang out with.  Paula had one last chance to make something of their flirtations before he was gone forever.  32

“Dad,” she whimpered, “Maybe we should tell him where we’re staying in case he can’t find his Uncle’s house or he isn’t home or something. I mean, I’d hate to see him have to spend the night on the street, don’t you think?”33

Carpenter spun around from the driver’s seat and gave Paula a puzzled look.  He didn’t know her to be especially kind to homeless strangers, since he had told her multiple times to avoid them and look the other way.  He had no clue that she was in love with Francisco.34

“Sure honey, if it will make you feel better,” he said, and copied the name and address of the motel from his trip planner onto a blank sheet in the back, and though he hated to do so, ripped the page out.  He handed it to Francisco.35

“Ok boy,” he said, “If you can’t find your Oncle then show this to someone who speak-a-the-En-glish and they’ll tell you how to find it. Best of luck, and just so you know, I’m not one to put someone out, but think of us as a last resort.”36

Francisco gave Paula one last look to confirm the fact that they would indeed see each other later that night, thanked Carpenter and shook his hand, and offered his hand to Jesse, who pretended not to notice.  Carpenter saw Francisco’s hand looming outside of Jesse’s window unshaken.  37

“Jesse! Shake the boy’s hand like a gentleman and let’s go already. I need to get checked in and get some sleep, driving all night was no good.”38

Jesse popped his door open and stood up out of the car. He saw a completely different man in Francisco, not the innocent, helpless boy he had met less than 12 hours before in St. Francis. He extended his hand to shake.  Francisco seemed to acknowledge the fact that Jesse had outed him, but he hadn’t outed him. Jesse had just figured him out.  Francisco was grateful that he wasn’t outed, and gave Jesse a warm handshake and a smile.  39

“Thank you,” he whispered to Jesse, “You saved my life, those guys in St Francis, they were going to kill me. I ended up there by mistake, and well, I really did see your car and noticed the out of state plates, and figured maybe you were road tripping, but I knew the Hotel and that owner– he was one of the worst in that town.  So I tried to appeal to you on the Christian level. Really, I’m a baptized Catholic, so I know how it is. Sorry for deceiving you. Thank you.” he said, and walked down the street towards a neighborhood of tightly plotted adobe houses with clay-tile roofs. Jesse popped his door back open and hopped into the car.40

“What was he sayin’ to you out there?” Carpenter asked.41

“I dunno, a bunch of stuff in Spanish with a couple of English words thrown in there. He was trying to say thank you because we’re Christians and he knows we’re real Christians, not like those people in St. Francis.” 42

“What about St. Francis? What exactly happened last night honey?” Mary asked.43

“Look, I said I’m tired and I’ll explain it all later. I was trying to keep you all safe, and the meeting was about dangerous people in the town.” 44

Technically, he didn’t lie.  It was enough to suffice for the moment, and they drove off down to the motel and checked in early (for an extra thirty-six dollars, which Carpenter protested, but nonetheless paid in the end).  Two rooms once again, two full beds in each, defined by the sex of the occupants.  In this case, the motel room/sex association was actually a demarcation of who not what.45

Carpenter hit the bed in his clothes, which was more than rare for him, and shuffled off his shoes with a flip of the ankles. He tucked himself under the comforter on top of the sheets.  To sleep this sloppy wasn’t his trick, but he was dead tired.  Jesse sat on the edge of his bed and leafed through the motel-standard Gideon’s looking for a verse on speaking honestly.  He would inaugurate something from Paul, possibly on the necessity of truth within brotherhood or something of the like. But everything he found pertaining to speaking the truth was cliché, and furthermore, it was all told to you. Was it cliché only because of the popularity of Christianity? Wouldn’t anything repeated for 2000 years become cliché? Or would it become something far more parlous– ingrained?46

Before testifying in a trial in America, a person would swear on the Bible that they would “Tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” That is how the court system would traditionally ensure the accuracy of testimony, which assumes that if people say fifteen words it magically inhibits their ability to lie. For instance, a Cop wouldn’t “lie” to get what he perceives as a criminal behind bars would he?  Do you have any idea how many people are in jail because of the testimony of two police officers?47

But we must not forget about evidence.  Without any evidence, it is really tough to convict someone without a confession. For the most part, the police testimony is meant to seduce you into taking a plea bargain.  If you don’t accept the State’s offer, then they’ll give the Officers license to indict you with his testimony, and you’ll be upriver for a while.  Unless you have the money to afford a competent attorney, you’re screwed.  If you have millions of dollars and an angle to pitch to the media, then you can do basically anything and get away with it. The legal system is so great in America– and that is the sad part. In other parts of the world they’re even more irrational than we are here.  But the problem is, the system doesn’t protecting everyone’s rights, it protects certain rights.  This isn’t about freedom, it is about strength through control and structure.48

Jesse found the verse he was looking for, but it took him much longer than he expected.  It was not by Paul, but by an Apostle  ostensibly more familiar and nominally familial; James.  Jesse had been misled by the Handy Reference Guide provided by the Gideons as an introduction to the text, and spent two hours wading through Hebrews, then Corinthians, then Matthew. Then something resonated in a verse that made him remember something he’d read a long time back; one of the few verses he’d committed to memory without instruction to do so. He found it quickly once he found the Book of James, which was literally a needle in a haystack in the Bible, just over six pages long.  49

“But above all things, my brethren” he read aloud, “Swear not, neither by heaven, neither by the earth, neither by any other oath: but let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay; lest ye fall into condemnation.”50

What the hell? Who was the moron that decided to swear on a book that specifically says “Above all things. . .swear not,”!?!  How could anyone misconstrue what is plain as day? The Bible contains the words “Above all things” four times. Jesse thought, immaculately provided with the other three instances of the seemingly singular statement.51

“Jeremiah, Chapter Seventeen, Verse Nine:” Jesse read aloud, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”52

“Peter, Chapter Four, Verse Eight: And above all things have fervent charity among yourselves: for charity shall cover the multitude of sins.”53

“John, Chapter One, Verse Two: Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.”54

Jesse contemplated the fantastic four, the “things” implicitly above all else, which logically includes faith and God.  He assimilated the four things and logically concluded that above all: We are to trust not the heart, but the mind.  We are to put trust in our words and not our oaths. We are to be kind to others, for this will make our mistakes seem irrelevant. Finally, we are to live– to prosper in health above all things.55

Above all things was very empowering to the human mind– but also very critical of the human body. Feeling is meant to deceive within this model. But to feel is to conquer– to question, then study, then master. Our environment is about mastery through manipulation of feeling– but not solely what we feel in our hearts. We must manipulate with the mind to truly experience the world. We dash through life feeling rather than experiencing– we must bring this ridiculous separation of essence and accident to rest.56

In that way, Love cannot be defined because love has no essence, love is purely accidental. Love is exhibited through acts; the resulting feelings of euphoria, safety and accomplishment are incidental and transitory. Love is the care for another human through acts; which is essentially sanctity. But sanctity assumes the essence, which my good friend Occam the Barber is happy to cleave out of the equation.57

Occam owned a little shop on the fringes of society, and trimmed beards for a living. In doing so, Occam civilized men.  Deduction was Occam’s profession; to take away the unnecessary “natural” attributes which man had developed by way of natural and causal circumstance. But was a beard a definition in itself?  To a bard, for sure. Who was this Occam character to make a living destroying the false definitions of man? 58

His simple approach to bleeding the truth from the body it rests in, though quite venerable, was often dismissed as overly simplistic, and in accord, denigrated. I remained a devout believer in the Barber, and visited him whenever I needed to clean up my own image. With a simple razor, he would help me craft a new image, and when he spun me around to look in the mirror, I always felt better– as if my true face had been revealed from the scruffy image of man I had once subscribed to.59

Did I need to know the Bible to live a good life?60

In America, the Bible was everywhere. If you didn’t know it, how could you understand the world around you? The Bible was the standard. How was this possible? Could you live a life in America without being Christian by proxy? How could you truly be religiously free within a system which has used religious rhetoric to propagate citizen’s compliance?  When times get rough, they turn to Divine Justice for answers. This underlies the concept of positive justice which is created and adapted by man to suit their social system. Positive justice varies from culture to culture, and is generally understood as something inherently non-universal. Whereas Divine Justice is universal.  This is the one problem with it though– who is man to be the judge of what is Divine Justice?61

If Divine Justice is revealed through happiness/good produced by the reader, then Divine Justice is relative. The diviner is inherently applying their own system of positive justice to the revelation which they experience, and using that experience to qualify their model of positive justice.62

Jesse put the Gideon’s back in the drawer and stripped down to his boxers.  He walked over to the vanity,  and washed his face with the little bar of soap provided by the wonderfully hospitable motel staff.  He pulled a generic white towel from the rack and dried his face and hands, and stared himself down in the mirror.  63

"Who tells the truth?" he thought.64

He walked over to the bed and pulled the covers back, and slipped off into the sandman’s soiree.65