He was floating somewhere and all around him “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,” Grateful Dead version, was echoing about. He always thought that the song was about death and it turns out he was right: Seasick sailors coming home; the highway is for gamblers; the saints are coming through.
The song made him think of Babe the Blue Ox, a gigantic creature. This outsized beast of burden - so kind and so noble. Even Paul Bunyan seemed a cheerful sort, with his black mustache and red-checked flannel shirt spread across his broad chest. Paul Bunyan made him feel excited about adventure! Stomp, stomp, stomp - off they went off into the wild blue yonder! No more cryin' by the kettle on the wood stove. Paul and his loyal blue ox would chop, chop, chop it all down. Whole groves of trees snapped in two before him like they were toothpicks from the dispenser at Marc's Big Boy.
Every now and then, the man got a glimpse of what was going on way down below. It didn’t look good. Fires issuing greasy plumes of black smoke. Lines of automobiles emptied of people strung along hundreds of miles of cracked interstates. Also, he heard things he never had before. A coalescing rising of sound (were they voices in languages he did not know?) would gather and then project itself across the infinite space in which he was suspended. He heard the cluster travel by at great speed. He believed it was the sound of the souls of animals his people were responsible for killing. Killing stupidly, not really for any particular reason. Out of boredom, perhaps. And here came another one. The gathering of a million voices and then the hurtling across space. It was like when he went to the batting cages as a boy and the electric pitcher arm would blast the ball toward him at such velocity that it seemed as if the machine was saying, “fuck you kid.”
He was probably going to run into his best friend from his band Boring Films Discorporated in this echoing blue space world. Why not? Maybe they could even sing a song together! He, the friend, had gotten out early, before the shit really hit the fan. But of course, for him it already had, right? The fan, the shit hit. Obviously. What was he thinking? He was already hospitalized twice for depression before he was 25 years old. He thought, who really did like this, the way it was all set up, anyway? Who was really into it? I bet if I could actually talk to Paul Bunyan, he would say that he was depressed. He suffered from migraines. He couldn’t take it. Every time he felled a forest, all the rabbits and deer and bears and little hoppy frogs who lived on the edges of the lush ponds disappeared also. It was terrible. Babe the Blue Ox was sad, too. What were they doing?!
The great ox should have stopped Paul Bunyan from chopping down all those trees! Paul pushed across Wisconsin, Minnesota, the Dakotas chopping, chopping, chopping. The giant blue ox should have stopped him! The animal could have charged him and caused him to run off a cliff somewhere west of the Mississippi and maybe we all wouldn’t be in the soup now. And the song came ringing back in.
You must leave, now take what you need
You think will last
But whatever you wish to keep
You better grab it fast
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the Sun
Look out baby, the saints are comin' through
And it's all over now, baby blue
No comments:
Post a Comment