Paul Siegell
The Afternoon Set of 12.31.99
It starts in the lobby of a marble hotel, like I’m there for a convention or
something; ahm:
I swing outside the glass turnstile doors to trade w/ the valet for a microbus,
but my old
friend “Chevy” is there, in the lot, beneath the awning & suckin’ down a huge
red balloon. In silly-
high helium-voice, he says: “This is great! You gotta try this!” and I laugh! &
I laugh myself
aloud, OUT of the dream & into the tent I lay sleeping-bag’d in at PHiSH
Big Cypress!
What a way to start a day! New Year’s Eve 2000, indEEd! —Lounging on
the folding chair
of the good morning, I follow w/ eyes the ants in the grass of a warm
winter’s day; they seem to
know. What they do to survive. Foraging. Painstakingly gathering
around the uneasy
beetle in our campsite. It seems to have an injured wing. OK, I
understand—I feel the
pressure. “I have to pee,” but don’t need to experience a port-
o-potty to do it. I’ve
seen some others walk out to the car-less patch of grass near
our site, so I decide,
well to wander. I leave my sandals w/ the folding chair
& glide off, greeting
hellos to those along the way. Real conversations
blending & cooking in cool
camps. Folks. Kin—A few feet past our area’s last, there’s a
strip of sand which dips
down, as if there used to be a small stream or canal there. I
ask myself, “What the?”
& realize there’s a cow bone, dead in the sand. Dry. Ball & Socket.
Looks like a femur. This
Reservation raises&slaughters; livestock. I jump over it w/ my
bare feet, back safe
onto green & softness, then find a spot to release. Nice.
Liberation. I step in
shit—When I finish my piss I step in shit. Human goopy shit—
Someone squish’d &
the mystical spaces b/w my toes now know it all too well. I
didn’t notice before, meh,
but cute little clumps of soil’d toilet paper have even been left
behind. “The Clean
Vibe” my ass! I head back to the cow bone & sand gully to wipe
off the freakin’ man-
feces. Nice. Where’s the Green Crew when you need them? I’ve
gotta wash my feet—
I go back & tell no one, but my feet are a mess. Salem notices,
softly laughs, says,
“Dirty Hippie,” & softly laughs, but we both know the truth about
our post-
Garcia selves. Knowing I’m not, relax’d & listening, I feel like I’m
at the beach
in this chair. I see grass & underneath that: dry dirt/earth, & Trey knows
the Piper’s
what’s worming around underneath that—My gaze angles up & sees
a dynamic, trans-
parent cloud of dots. Gnats. Swarming about as if some bell’d
juggler deftly
containing the region of air his goofy beanbags were in. “Why
do gnats do that?” I
ask aloud. “All cluster’d up like that, in one tight spot.
What are they doing?”
Samson’s girlfriend, Suzy, answers w/, “Mating.” They’re
both bio-scientists
taking grad classes at the U. of Pennsylvania. Ivy. As the timbre
of her voice reaches
me w/ the sound of her “ting,” for a microsecond, a flash, my eyes
still w/i the cloud,
a science class’s diagram of the grand & negatively- charged double-helix
wink’d at me. 100% Sober.
A true hallucination! It was like a constellation frozen for a
moment in the movement of the
gnats. A split-second show of the molecular homes for hydrogen,
oxygen, phosphorus,
the carbons in the helical phosphate- ester chains, & the
cross-link’d purine &
pyrimidine bases. Amazingly, for an instant I saw it, but told
no one about it… Wait,
were you ever taught that that dark, leafy, castle-like presence
in Van Gogh’s
Starry Night is actually a large, cemetery-marking cypress tree? Ah,
Y2K—Fuck these
pessimistic prophecies Safety first—Hemp spirals, indEEd…. We clean’d
up our Big Cypress camp,
pack’d our gear, & headed out for the Afternoon Set: It was N.Y.E. but
still in sun & just
off to the right of my crew: 18 Day-Glo green-caped superheroes of
the scene, one of
which was w/ child: a partying father w/ a feathery newborn boy—It was
the li’l
newbie’s bouncin’ phirst show! But, strange vacation, this baby was w/
toy: a smaller
day-glo green plastic blow-up doll: the famous alien of dark-angled eyes.
And o, Salem
call’d it: it was: “The most calming thing in the world.” Whooooooo’s
got my cameraaa?December 31, 1999
Big Cypress Reservation
