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About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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Where I am now Where I am now, it's about ten minutes to sun-up. The frogs are part of the evening chorus, so right now it's just crickets. In a few minutes the coffee machine will join in, drooling hot water over beans picked and roasted maybe fifty miles from here as the crow flies—if that crow can make it up to 13,000 feet without gasping for air. The local roosters are already starting their moronic chanting. They speak with a strange accent here, emphasizing the wrong syllable and spattering the usual phrasing with glottal stops we wouldn't normally know to listen for.
I'm halfway up the mountain, so it's almost seventy degrees this Thanksgiving morning. It ought to get into the low eighties today not long after sunrise. Around here, the sun (and moon and stars) don't dick around much. It's dark fifteen minutes after sunset, but the setting sun can still bake and burn. Venus, if it's in the sky when the sun is down and there's no moon, can cast motherfuckin' shadows. There may be clouds today, even a bit of rain, but if it starts to annoy me, I'll just drive for a while until I'm on top of them and can piss on them from the heights.
Night before last I hiked for a while, bounding along the tops of boulders that are younger than I am, to go see more earth being born in fire and ocean, fresh from Pele's womb. Except for the steam plume, the sky was so unobscured I could hear the galaxies singing over the roar of the sea.
In the next room is the beautiful woman I love who also loves me. Some combination of coffee and roosters will flip her switch in a moment or two. An hour from now she will be draped over the black sands of a beach somewhere, roasting her skin to match the coffee inside her. The lovely drawing of a bird a local artist drew on her left shoulder (to match the design on the shirt I was wearing yesterday) will also darken with the suns rays. The drawing may only last a week or two—enough for us to miss it horribly when it fades. Enough to tempt us to etch it in permanent ink.
For the past week or so, we've lived in houses. For the next few days we'll live in a shack draped with mosquito netting. After that, we'll live in a van that has a bed inside so we can wake up where the things are we want to see. In ten days we've put a thousand miles on a rental car and just about as many on our legs.
I've given blood to the stones and the sea and the occasional polite insect. I've eaten off the ground things I had no names for that merely looked liked they'd be edible and juicy and delicious, and I've been right. I've been approached by a happy furry god that demanded that I scratch his ass for him where he couldn't reach. I've been accosted by fish swimming in my warm salty bathwater. Food leaps off of the trees and out of the water and into the path demanding to be eaten.
If I've seen the news in the past ten days, it's been by complete accident. The only news that's relevant here is what day of the week it is so you'll know whether it's worthwhile to go to the market, and possibly whether fresh lava has fucked up certain roads to the extent that you'll have to find another way to where you want to go today. I hear that sometimes the news is rougher, when the ocean and sky and earth wake up on the wrong side of the bed and try to kill you. But otherwise this is heaven.
Time has no meaning here. Evil is thousands and thousands of miles away. To paraphrase a muppet, the only evil here is what you bring with you.
In another ten days, I'll be headed back to my house. To money problems, to work problems, to illness and obstacle and anger. The only way I will survive is if I bring some of this place back with me.
It looks like I'd better be bringing back enough to share.
This message in it's electronic bottle will get to you the same day I get back to the mainland. If you pray, pray for me.
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Vidicon, unplugged. |
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Pages: 1 of 1 Where I am now
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