Wolverine Liberation Army

Los Angeles is a city undivided in its division. The grime, the smog, the midsummer heat. Everyone is affected, the rich, the poor, the young. The old. LA is the last, great American tabloid. Those who love the city will claim that there’s nothing like it on a clear day, a crisp day, when the Santa Anas roll in from the desert and brush their westward across the expansive blue of the Pacific.

Barwis thought of these things, and then thought of a world gone to hell.

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David Bowie wrote “The Final Countdown” before “The Final Countdown” was actually written. “Space Oddity” is the final countdown. “The Final Countdown,” as a concept, as a thing, as a fragment of intellectual property, is inherently dishonest. And, disappointingly so. Countdown? Countdown to what, exactly? When Major Tom burst through the clouds into the infinite blackness of space, time became irrelevant. Unconstrained nothingness deems the fiction of spirituality meaningless. In his tin can, floating high (but not that high, when you consider everything) above the marbled gloss of an absurd world, Tom remarks, with clarity and with poise, upon the only thing that can, or should, exist. “Tell my wife I love her very much, she knows.”

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The distant mountains sat dark blue in the fog-streaked ether. Barwis sighed, clenching his teeth tight against each other. Exhale. Inhale. He counted in irregular patterns of serpentine disillusionment. He spat dark mottles of blood onto the dirt, shivering in the morning chill. He wrapped the twine around his upper arm and pulled until it cut deeply into his circulation, forcing his median cubital skyward.

Barwis buried needle the in his arm and prayed for warmth. Prayer, of course, existed only as a conceptually ironic disillusion of a man lost in the wilderness.

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