by Gordon J. McNaughton
They barricaded the highway to make way for a motorcade flying cellophane flags, cheaply dressed in drag wearing black, paying tribute to a minister playing in a drum'n'bass Elton John cover band. They tweeted a number of slogans and Facebooked a list of demands, all encrypted, coded and bolded, sent from cellphone to cellphone from their headquarters in rural Indiana, around a bonfire not yet photographed by a notorious alt-fashion mag, turned into a totem fetishized by long haired tweens and their sexually frustrated dads. The rite of passage was navigating a round-robin gamut of plastic bags, covered with a greasy film of fingerprints, outlines of nudes and pine tree resin. All the prisons leased their grounds to provide backgrounds for publicity shots, mall parking lots filled with toddlers in wife beaters, eager beavers with coolers full of meat cleavers, cold alcoholic energy drinks and TV Guides.
Protests spread like brushfires as tattooed pre-school teachers wrenched shrubbery from prize-winning gardens and commercial office buildings were deconstructed piece by piece from the roof down. Massive bird cages were launched into space to capture UV rays and the Kraft trademark was projected from NASA headquarters onto the moon. Cheeseface. Pizza brain, rose hips and gelatin draft racing. Walmart goes subterranean, deals get progressively hotter as albino mole-men dig the womens' plus size section into the earth's core. Giant mothballs calve off of continental wax shelves and drag halos of whales toward the edge of the world and over.
Meanwhile back in Jamestown the Pilgrims march across the interstate with rolled up posters of sausage magnate Jimmy Dean, pockets of sofa-stale air spontaneously combusting like short circuits, ribbons of gluten floating ominously through the upper stratosphere. The banks reopen to the sound of experimental lo-fidelity cheering, Susan Sontag and Jamie Kennedy ride a Ducati across the wastes of Kennebunkport, Maine and lasso giant ferret hybrids with a 50 foot fiber optic cable. Somewhere someone uses a mnemonic device to remember Jimmy Carter's favorite non-dessert pastry and a baby gets bounced into the 5th Dimension by a cohort of well meaning neoliberals wearing Patagonia vests.
A rainbow of stuffed animals appears over the headquarters of the Nigerian Peoples' Liberation Electrician's Guild, but is finally attributed not to benevolent eyes crying organic pie mix in the sky but rather radiation leaking from the cooling system of the Sub-Saharan Make-a-Wish Foundation delegation's energy source. A lower middle class family somewhere in the upper middle latitudes gathers around the dinner table reading postcards sent by the hungry children of middle upper class bistro cultures noted for their spacious housing and well defined abdominals. Loud explosions are heard through the wall separating one set of lives from another, as a runway is freshly poured through the living room burying stick-legged supermodels whose movements slow until almost ceasing, allowing them just enough wiggle room to perform pilates with their free fingers and age like Madame Tousseauds figures selected by a bionic Tyra Banks for their expert stoicism under duress.
In Kansas City, Kansas, carbombs line up endlessly at a traffic light, drivers flipping through a thousand satellite radio stations airing nothing but paranoid Christ Bikers, erection medication advertisements and Ryan Seacrest affiliate programs. Ticking without talking, the bumper to bumper terrorism drags on from one red light strip to the next, while giant moths hang from dim arclights and emit a barely audible sound, kind of like the sound of two polyester pant legs rubbing together on a humid afternoon. Nothing booms, no effort awaits gratification, the colors don't run, only change slightly with the light. No answers produced, not even any good questions. Just the slow drone of a mediocre tone, groggily rousing itself just in time to change syllables.
