I AM Fred Jackson - Idaho license plate: CYN1C.

Traveling the highway in my '74 Buick, my life intertwines with the mixture of personality and filth. My social commentary is continuous and follows the theme of the double yellow lines that separate me from death.
 

April 30, 2007

Antarctica looms large in our minds, invisible. Under the horizon, waiting for us. Part of the subconscious American desire for a frontier and for a clean start. The self-selection repeats through history. Africa for the Middle East for Europe for the Atlantic seaboard for Midwest for California and now West meets East and there is nowhere left to go. We tried up, but our will was not enough. So Antarctica is left. Nowhere land and the promised land for the nowhere man. The fresh start. More hospitable than Mars but less. To be American is to be part of the latest link in that chain of renewal, that chain of expansion. At each generation, some of the siblings are left behind, but some go. Those that go continue a motion that started before civilization began. The vitality that carries Truth through the crucible. Sustenance for future generations.

Go.

December 12, 2006

This planet is small. Many times we act as if the walls between us are meaningful and keep us from responsibility, but my travel has taught me otherwise. Open your eyes and see how most of us really live.

March 11, 2006

Two years and you don't know me. I am the same. I am different. Think on this one. Our road is getting longer.

Do you see the problem? The seeping hate and creeping fear filling your mind? Think again about how you have treated your neighbor, your colleague, your friend over the past six months. Are you satisfied with what happened?

They sell us fear and we buy it at a discount. We eat it for lunch and we serve it to our families for dinner. The fear then passes on through our actions to the next person. It is a cycle that must be stopped.

You can only fear if you have something you can loose. What can you lose that they can take away? Rattle and rattle again. Think about the sliver. Think about the created thing. You have nothing to lose. You have nothing to fear. Nothing you have is yours so you have nothing to lose. Live like the free person you really are. Love is your action. Love is your reason. Love is the thing that will set you free.

If you doubt it, have you really tried it?

May 18, 2004

The CALIFORNIAN. Existence sliding down the U-tropolis in lanes of burnished steel effortlessly changing in and out. Uber extreme ultimate minimalist lines running through my mind of separation from the rest of this insane continent. I dream in color and black and white and ultraviolet rays which dance helplessly against the protective coverings on my eyes. Impervious to all and in unity with the one who knows everything that I ever cared for or loved. I see my future now all gleaming and new with the white of polished kubrick flowing over me in a grip of ever tightening force. I am one with my alpha state, my separation, my lack of anxiety, my independence, my freedom, my CALIFORNIA.

July 18, 2003

We all look up at the same stars.
We are all virtually identical, perfectly balanced manifestations of order in a decaying universe.
Why do we hate each other?
Why do we allow ourselves to be enslaved?
Why are we so afraid?

September 4, 2002

I must confess that the alien forms concern me in an ambiguous way. the copter vectors in hyperbolic on a course to intercept the fleeing felon with whom I suddenly have total sympathy. the fear of the oppressor is overwhelming. ancient pool, ancient palm, american idol climbing the stairway to heaven. the neutral gaze of the cigarrette is unexpected, glowing in the dark peering into things unknown. the red neon hovers above like a valkarie ready to strike, dominating all, impervious to all, unknown to all but a few. shapes out of an era gone but not too long ago seep into my pores like the distance acceleration of a motor with a holy exhaust. I cannot penetrate the angusish again unknown undefined undetermined within my own self. it is the blocked self with a bulwark impenetrable to all but the other. palm nuts drop in the silence like neutron bombs. the silence is defined by their deafening roar. why the smoke rises and rests within the fronds of the umbrella uncomfortably holding the noxious power in an anti-parabolic embrace.

August 20, 2002

My vision pours liquid from my eyes clouds swirl and hide and tempt to reveal without mercy. As I look my being takes on a new shape of the ships illuminated with the pollution glow of a thousand metal fires. Filtered sun creates the layers of Jupiter before my eyes a burning haze rising from the scorched landscape below. Passing into the layer vision again becomes tantalization shapes hint top and bottom seeing but not quite seeing pattern recognition locks in on the void synthesizing from nothingness shapes of ground and sky only imagined in a dream.

I am really here this is really happening.

Holding on to God's object reality a little too tightly becomes keenly aware of the blood and the eye and the hands and the distance away from all that is important.

I will not wake up and find it different.

I reach for a flavor and a taste and a smell long gone the memory of which is much stronger than any sight or sound but maybe not of feel but feel in a different way feel like emotion or sense of being A sense and desire for a filtered past which removes the offenses but keeps the distilled essence of well being a past which did not exist but now does in the deep recesses of the new self behold the old has gone and he is a new creation. The simple memory of the enjoyment of unfettered relaxation free from dred or planning or responsibility the pursuit of which keeps us from forming new distilations of the present for the future for those times were enjoyed both then and now but here now is even more valuable not something to be navigated to some other goal.

Don't ever forget what you really mean.

June 10, 2002

Racing West, the sun blazes at me through an unblemished blue sky, but then it doesn't. I reach up to feel the sunglasses on my face which are not there. In a stupor I pull over and sit by the sidewalk as it continues to get darker, thinking, reeling, forgetting, then remembering. It is a dust cloud? It can't be. Is it an eclipse? It must be, but I didn't hear about it before hand. Two leaves confirm that it is an eclipse. A big one. I stare until the crescent moves to waxing. Finally at ease, I continue to motor.

We are so dependent on media that anything unannounced is unsettling. How can it be real, I didn't hear about it on TV?

September 27, 2001

There once was a time a long time ago, when my awareness was out at the tip of my nose in a Vivarin dream. Skill without equal, the wires would fly and connect and complete the circuit created a million times and never before. Double boost for the extra morning and on into the night with an extra countermeasure for relaxation. Pink octagon dream of mirrorshades wraped tightly around my eyes. I could see the future and I was its architect. Six figures or the garbage man. Truth be told the value to society is greater for the latter. Screaming reality I wished to recreate, manipulate, deviate. The small world in the computer screen is the mini-universe where the testosterone dominated has complete control.

The bridge crossed was precarious.

June 27, 2001

The pain in my leg is shooting upward. When I am encountered, they speak to me in German. In this environment, I have successfully suppressed my brash American nature for something a bit more native. Invading the continent of my ancestors and seeing how truly it is the same as the one we now occupy. Asia looks different. The land posesses a unique texture and the plants scream their individuality, never letting you forget that you are not at home. This is not true here. It feels more like visiting a museum district rather than a foreign land. My relation to these people is strangely palpable.

Shooting northward into the sun. 11pm at night, the sun is still peeking above the horizon, and we still have further to go. My sixth grade teacher once challenged me to provide hard evidence that the world is a globe. Theories I had previously relied on 3rd hand accounts and books to support, I can now vouch for directly.

The Earth is a globe offset from a perfect vertical axis. I have taken measurements of the sun at the equator, in both hemispheres, and toward its northern pole. I have seen that it gets cold in July, the sun does not come up in February and it does not set in June. And twice I have traveled continuously West just to end up at the same place I started.

The Earth is a globe offset from a perfect vertical axis. But knowing this directly does not make it any more real for me than when I took the truth of it on the word of others. Such is the nature of faith. You will not get your confirmation until you do not need it. If you did, your faith would have been meaningless.

May l4, 2001

I am reaching across time and space. Unable to fix reality to the bolts around my neck. The oppression of distance is always great, but why today does it weigh especially heavy on me. I grip the edge of the counter and realize that every face passing before me is precious. This culture heaves like a surging flood, flowing forward in time, changing every minute. Do not think that you know what to expect.

July 11, 1999

The millenium approaches... who are you America? What do you believe in? What do you look like? In our drive toward selfish balkanization, we seem to have forgotten the basics. America is the world and the world is America. To be an American is the birthright of all humankind. To be an American all you have to do is believe and choose.
 

 
Nothing more, nothing less. We must never forget these words.

April 10, 1998

I extract myself from civilization like a sliver to rattle around in the open palm of God.

Racing south on I15 in my internal combustion machine. The static stream of metal on the other side of the freeway goes on for miles. Cars sit and wait for the next rotation of the strange attractor to set them free. My mind suddenly fills with the realization that all of that metal, thousands of miles of it, was dug out of the ground to make those cars. How could there be any left? I continue my unimpeded upstream tour of the lanes of pain and watch the heat rise from the idling vehichles.

Did you ever think the millenium would look like this?

January 12, 1997

Who am I? I am the Luddite, the Unabomber, the survivalist gone to ground. I am the technophile, the Borg, one of the information-haves. I am the Sultan, the subduer, Alexander the Great rolling across the continents. I am Moses, Thomas Paine, Crazy Horse, defiant under the heel of oppression. I am the Republican, the plutocrat, the industrialist concerned only for myself. I am the Democrat, the socialist, the progressive looking out for my neighbor. I am all of these things and more. They all hide in the corners of my mind, competing for the attention of my intellect. They are the curse of intelligence, being able to see all sides and thus limiting the ability to act.

July 27, 1996

I see myself in a blurry dream. As the road leaves its impression rolling on the back of my eyelids, I see the cloud mountains stretching before me. Held in sharp relief by the setting sun, you can almost walk on their firm surface. Light tracings of the world below peek through from the depths, thousands of feet that may as well be hundreds of miles. Layers upon layers of reality glide beneath me as I slowly sink. The cloud towers become taller and call to me to step out across their tundra. The ripples and eddies chance upon one another stirred up by butterfly wings in China. I feel the first layer cut across my face, its sharp wetness a stark contrast to the drying blast of sun and wind that had dominated my senses. White turns to orange turns to grey then black. The underbelly of the beast is now above me, sheltering me through the dense layers of cloud which whirl on all sides. Slowly the burning orange of a setting sun glimmers a thin laser at the horizon. With the touch of an angel, I wake up at home.

July 12, 1996

The broken white lines continue interspersed with the black of tar patches fixing cracks in the weathered surface. Deep into the Angeles National Forest the sun turns pink and the air is thick. Fires rage on all side with helecopters dropping water in rediculously small amounts on the raging flame. Deeper into the smoke the highway rolls and the color of the light plays on my skin and my mind. The dancing pink is entrancing and almost allows you to forget the horrible stench of burning brush. Drop speed from 85 to 65, don't want to hit anybody in the dense smoke and CHiPs are out there making sure you comply. Wrap your arms around this world, full of burrning pain and choking indifference. Drop into L.A. and meet the next raging blaze.

May 7, 1996

My brain is shaped by fear. Growing up the threat of Mutual Assured Destruction affected every thought. This fear divided people into two groups: fatalists and survivors. The fatalists would view the coming war and declare their intentions to die in the initial salvo of nuclear death. The survivors would see this first salvo as their first challenge to rebuilding a new world free of the false vestages of human civilization. I was a survivor. In every school project, the theme of survival cropped up. When given the opportunity to choose a topic to give a report on, I chose "star wars." When creating your dream house, mine was compartmentalized and was able to quickly retract underground and had its own water purification and fusion reactor.

Americans are at their best when their fear is focused like a laser. It gives us a sense of purpose and allows us to achieve the unachievable. The cold war was a lens without equal. When your life and the life of all your decendents were threatened with hot nuclear fire and cold nuclear winter, it gave perspective and motivation. Now, the lens is gone and we have no idea how to exercise the great power we wield. Lesser nations (or perhaps wiser nations) would use this power to create a Pax Americana around the world that would last a 1000 years. But we are different. We are Gojira, always protecting against the impending foe, but quickly retreating without demand of payment after the threat is gone.

New World Disorder... Where do we go from here?

February 22, 1996

Time travel is easy if you know how to get on a plane. Bam it is tomorrow, bam it is yesterday. I dreamed once that I was a monkey unable to understand what is happening around me. Now I know that it is always true since our ability to penetrate and grasp the true nature of the universe is severely limited.

The hive mentality is flowing through me. No double yellow lines for me here, just a toy truck and a bullet train. The blackness is making me uneasy and the heavy coffee is weighing hard on my sanity. Standing in the shower I experience a rolling dizziness that is not at all unpleasent. Tired beyond words, sleeping five out of the last forty-eight, I drive on past zebra and into the uncharted territories of ultra Z.

Civilization as far as the eye can see, you could wander for weeks and never be free of faces. Activity thirty-six hours a day constant pulsing, my vision slightly pixelized I yearn for the comfort of eight cylinders and 308 cubic inches of combustion.

February 13, 1996

Although I am loath to say it, I am impressed with the performance of Herr Patrick Buchanan. Impressed in the sense that one is always surprised at the lack of proper consideration people give to their choices when they are caught up in dogma. His kind of populist rhetoric would make Huey Long proud.

Slippery when wet is an interesting concept that connects to the human psyche on multiple levels. One is an instinctive reaction to danger, another is a lure to pleasure. Both are pure emotions that are unhindered by logic.

My eyeball scans the horizon for the first whiff of rain. I see the mountain holding the cloud in its lap, perhaps to prevent it from straying and giving its waters to someone else. Blue blazing trucks plow through the air and their concussion wave rocks my car like a small doughnut as they pass.

Why is it that what is over the horizon is more interesting than what is right in front of you? Celebration of the mundane is the key to joy in life. The lone rock, the glistening dew, the dried roadkill, the splash of wildflowers all gather in the focus of my mind. Jumping in celebration of my recognition. A self-awareness that they are important too - not to be missed.