Once in a Blue Agave Moon: A Small World Gets a Whole Lot Bigger

 

 

Chapter Eleven

Elliott was overjoyed about the prospect of seeing Jed again.

Whether it was just a visit, or even possibly a longer stay, Jed was always welcome in Elliott’s world.

Jed’s arrival was a welcome surprise in a world where there was rarely any good news from the outside world.

It was the other voice that had completely unnerved him. Soft and feminine, Aimée’s voice sounded slightly timid, perhaps even a little shy. She knew how to be coy; she knew men liked that…sometimes; and even when she was being completely genuine, she knew how to make the most out of what could pass for the most subtle nuances of voice, facial expression, and body language.

Elliott had told her once that she should have been an actress.

“Who says I’m not?” she replied. “The whole world’s a stage…that we’re all going through….”

There are some people who are addicted to sensationalism and overacting just to be the center of attention…they’re just the kind of idiots that can give Drama a bad name.

The Theater was in Aimée’s blood. It was a part of her nature, and as she was trained in Method Acting, there was Method even in her madness.

What might have passed for pretense to the untrained eye was an instinct for angle, lighting, mood, setting and presentation, and she always hit her mark.

Even when she was startled, or genuinely terrified there was  a cinematic quality to it that guaranteed that you could not take your eyes off of her.

None of this was lost on Elliott, who was at that time a college professor who taught filmmaking, videography and photography to a group of students he affectionately referred to as the Gonzo Media Freaks.

Yes, she was beautiful. She was more than just pretty, but she was never able to see it in herself, and that gave her the unassuming vulnerability and genuine humility that made her so adorable…especially to Elliott.

She had always believed that it was Elliott who had ‘discovered’ the beauty queen that had been shyly lurking beneath the ugly duckling she had been led to believe she was.

She stumbled into Elliott’s office one afternoon, looking for one of his students, whom she had promised a ride back to the stockade where he was being incarcerated while he was allowed educational leave until he finished his sentence for drug possession with intent to sell.

They had both gone to North Miami Beach Senior High School together a few years before, and she had dated him for a very short while a long time ago.

She was married now, and completely ‘over’ Kenny, but she was also desperately trying to recover from her utter disappointment in her husband, who had further reinforced her feelings of inferiority and insecurity.

That morning, as he left the house, with his wife Jeannie following him out to the street, screaming like a fish-wife, Elliott realized what a terrible mistake he had made and resigned himself to the fact that it was only a matter of time….

Only  few hours later, this total stranger, who had wandered into his office looking for one of his students seemed as captivated by every word he spoke as he was by hers.

They chatted briefly about filmmakers from Brecht to Hitchcock to Kubrick, Tarantino, and Oliver Stone as well as a shared a mutual fascination for the screenwriting of Charlie Kaufman.

They were soon marveling in how similar each other’s frame of reference was.

They shared interests in writers like Hunter Thompson, and Tom Robbins as well as Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Heinlein and Dave Barry.

Indeed, they did not seem to need to try to impress each other, but the growing fascination over their shared interests and points of view was nothing short of exhilarating to the point of being breath-taking as Infatuation was overcome by the Crush they seemed destined to develop.

Both had been wallowing in Sarcasm, Facetiousness, Irony and Bitterness for so long that many of their best friends had begun to regard them as jaded and cynical.

Yet suddenly it was as if it was raining Enthusiasm, Optimism and Mutual Admiration right there inside Elliott’s office until they were both ‘mud luscious and puddle wonderful’ right up to their knees.

Elliott turned both ways as if to look over his shoulders as he leaned forward as if he was about to share something he did not want anyone else to hear.

“Are you married?” Aimée suddenly blurted, seemingly out of nowhere.

The remark so completely startled Elliott that he sat back, having completely forgotten what it was he had intended to say (but not his intent to kiss her).

After several very long seconds, he took a deep breath and said “Just barely….”

Two seconds later, Kenny burst into Elliott’s office, late and panting.

Spouting explanations and apologies, he suddenly stopped short and remarked “…so I guess you two have already met….” followed by a gratuitously flattering introduction regarding the genius of Elliott Monroe, abruptly veering off onto an almost tersely marginalized hand-off to Aimée which included an inappropriately familiar reference to their previous romantic relationship followed with “…by the way, how’s Jeannie?”

“As compared to what, Kenny?…the Lake of Fire?…she could make even  that seem like a bed and breakfast in rural Vermont…”

Aimée winced, and then winked at Elliott. “We have to go…I’ll see ya in the funny papers, kiddo.”

They got not even a glimpse of each other for more than two days after that, but Elliott found it almost impossible to think of anything, or anyone else in the interim. 

In the several weeks that followed, Elliott separated from his wife, and moved into Amy’s apartment, along with his brother, who had arrived just two days before on a visit, unexpectedly, not suspecting the impending turmoil.

Within a week, he returned to Indiana, once again disturbed by his elder brother’s instability and recklessness.

Within a couple weeks, they found a house, and Elliott and Aimée moved in together along with Joe, one of Elliott’s fellow faculty members, who was also looking for new digs.

They were madly in love with each other, and more than just a little bit mad in general.

As crazy as they were for each other, their general craziness was a breeding ground for quarrels, although in all fairness, it was usually over  Elliott’s behaviors, which had taken on an even more extreme quality that provoked Amy’s outbursts of anger, bordering on rage.

Truth was, they might have had a better chance of making it work if they hadn’t jumped right out of one marriage bed to another.

It seems to be an unwritten law that there needs to be an intermediate romantic fling that allows you to get over the previous relationship, and since both had gone “from one frying pan to another” they  both engaged in provocative and bizarre behaviors that would have terminated a lesser degree of commitment between two people.

Their fights often involved horrible emotional violence that seemed to be spawned as a test to see if each of them could forgive the unforgivable in each other.

Eventually Aimée moved into a place of her own, and they dated for another three and a half years. It seemed as if the separation had revived their passion for each other.

God was alive and Majic was afoot.

But suddenly Elliott went on the road with a band that hired him as a guitarist shortly after he had decided to terminate his association with Jed, and Aimée took off to go to the Pacific Northwest, which was about as far as she could get away from Elliott. She sent a few letters, which he never answered, and they didn’t see each other for over a year.

They got back into Miami within a week of each other, and spent an entire weekend in bed together, only to mutually decide it was over, but for no real reason.

It was Elliott who broached the subject, and Aimée agreed, albeit somewhat half-heartedly. Elliott lived to regret that moment many times over the years and suspected it might have turned out differently if he hadn’t turned away from her the way he did.

In the years that followed, he sometimes referred to her as “the ex-wife that I never married.”

That was years ago…several lifetimes and two more marriages ago.

Long before he ever met and married Chianna. Before his children were born and grown.

It was hard to imagine Jed and Aimée together. They knew each other of course, but they remained aloof and somewhat distant in each other’s company, but there was a pretty good explanation for that.

Jed considered himself too much of a gentleman to fuck his best friend’s girlfriend, despite the fact that neither Elliott or Aimée would have thought that to be a real deal-breaker with either of them.

Jed also made himself perfectly clear that he thought Aimée was much too “high-maintenance” (which she was).

Because Aimée felt rejected, she treated Jed dismissively and said she found him shallow, conceited, and selfish (which he was not) but Elliott did not bother to try to convince Aimée otherwise because although he would be reluctant to admit it, he felt a slight twinge of jealousy at the thought of Aimée and Jed having sex together.

Elliott knew that what would pass for jealousy in this case would be more due to insecurity; something he so despised in himself that he would embrace it with the same state of mind as a man who has decided to ‘stare down the train’ knowing it will mean certain death.

In those days, he never backed down, and he could lay down a pretty good bluff, not to mention that he already knew he possessed both the greatest luck and the shittiest judgement of any man alive.

It turned out to be something of a self-fulfilling prophesy that tended to lead Elliot to believe that it made little difference what decision he made because it was usually wrong, which prompted him to act on reckless impulse, knowing that somehow despite all the odds, he would prevail…or at least live through it.

The longer he considered it, the more sense it made. Probably some sort of cosmic coincidence threw the two of them together, and inevitably pure curiosity would overwhelm their better judgement…just the same sort of circumstances that occurred when Elliott and Aimée found themselves thrown together into an emotional maelstrom from which neither could escape;  both beautiful and tragic, that they undoubtedly would rememberer for the rest of their lives both fondly and sadly.

The few minutes that it took to remember and ponder this before Jed, and Aimée, arrived with Rebecca, and Leigh-Anne, whom he did not know were also with them.

It had seemed like the longest ten minutes of his life, and yet it seemed all too short to prepare himself for what was to come.

Any shock after hearing Aimée’s voice would be anti-climactic were they not also former lovers from Elliott’s past.

He had no idea of what to expect, but whatever it was, he could hardly wait to find out.

Namasté

नमस्ते

Chazz Vincent

copyright  ©  March 13th, 2021  

Fish swim with the tides, in and out of the lagoon as it empties itself, receives from, and flows back into the sea.

*ALL REFERENCES TO ANY PERSONS CONFIRMED STILL LIVING IS PURELY CO-INCIDENTAL…AND THE DEAD ARE TOO BUSY LAUGHING AT US TO CARE.

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Once in a Blue Agave Moon chapter four: Location, location…LOCATION!

During the eighteenth century, the Lowlands Scots seemed to naturally gravitate to the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys and the Smokey Mountains region of the United States .
Australia was originally a penal colony for the United Kingdom.
Similarly, Florida was the lint trap for everything that got shook loose from the rest of the landmass of the contiguous forty-eight states of the continent.
It hangs like a huge semi-flaccid uncircumcised penis, far too laid back to protrude upward very far into the Atlantic Ocean, more of a “Show/her” than “Grower” and complacent enough to just engorge itself into the warmer tropical waters, also attributing to the belief that “the lower the latitude, the stronger the sex drive.”
Everyone who comes to Florida has a cover story for why they moved here, but secretly, right before they left wherever they came from, something happened somewhere else, and it just seemed like everything was so much easier there.
They share a heritage of escapism which tends to create a mindset that remains a prevailing theme of those recently immigrated.
There is such a thing as the mentality, or state of mind of the founding culture of the location that is shared by a majority of the residents who were descendants of smugglers or wreckers; real full-time professional criminals who are trying to just lay low for awhile, vs. the full-time amateur criminals of convenience and circumstance, such as junkies and addicts, as well as every level of drug dealer, the “musicians” and “artists” who patronized them, whores, gigolos, long-and-short con men (and women), real-estate speculators, rain-makers, lightning-rod salesmen, snake-oil purveyors and of course, telemarketers, all of whom constitute a group best described as “casual criminals” and have as much regard for the “Law of Man” as an alligator.
And of course, first the Cubans, and the Haitians, seeking political asylum, the Colombians (for a whole host of varied reasons) and then the Mexicans, Guatemalans, and the Dominicans.
Almost nothing is manufactured in Florida…no factory jobs here to speak of, except the few sugar processors around Lake Okeechobee that haven’t already been phased out, and of course Motorola, boat and marine accessories and a few furniture manufacturers.
Most business in Florida jumps more or less directly from agribusiness (especially oranges and grapefruits) to the service industry/hospitality services, food service, entertainment, technical support for local businesses as well as the ubiquitous health service professionals; paramedics, nurses, doctors and patient care technicians and nursing homes, senior communities, and intensive care wards hence the moniker “Florida is God’s Waiting Room”….
Eventually, the glut of cheap relatively desperate labor for displaced ex-pats of every stripe resulted in the establishment of telemarketing centers in Florida.
It also meant that many who immigrated there were fleeing to avoid prosecution, or alimony or just a bad marriage in general. Even the cities were not as crowded or overwhelming as up north; people trying to get away from something seeking asylum or escape, where they believed the opportunities were like ripe, low-hanging fruit, like some latter-day version of The Grapes of Wrath.
No unions, fewer licensing and regulations, less and no state taxes.
So Florida, much like Australia, the Smokey Mountains, and California became a haven for outcasts, criminals, and ne’er do wells of every stripe looking for escape to a better life…”your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Send these the tempest-tossed to me…”
(we’ll leave the light on…).

Once In a Blue Agave Moon

chapter One

Elliott Monroe awoke to the sounds of the generators starting.
As he briefly lay there in bed, he thought about how much the world had changed in the last eighteen months.
Over two years ago, he had read about how cyber-terrorists were launching over thirty thousand attacks against the United States and their allies every month…without success…but…
Much like the theories of quantum mechanics and the origin of the earth, eventually anything can happen, and like the monkeys and the typewriters, eventually they discovered the codes that were capable of deciphering the encryption associated with the operating systems of every computer on the planet; banking, defense, security, even the internet itself.
The consequences were catastrophic and swift.
They had not only managed to withdraw all the virtual monies out of all the North and South American, European, African, Swiss, and Japanese banks in the world, they had also placed a “doomsday” virus into the operating systems that caused them to destroy themselves, and their hardware, as well as all the records of all the accounts.
And when back-up systems and replacement programs were installed, the rest of the internet was so polluted with the Doomsday Virus that they were quickly rendered useless as well.
It took several days for even the best run operations to re-start, only to discover there were no funds in the accounts shortly before they too self-destructed.
Even if you had a printed statement from your bank, they were not being honored because there were no available funds to pay anybody anything.
It was believed that Doomsday was not even a single virus, but rather a series of interlocking programs that spread rapidly through any device that used the internet at all…even if only to use the National Observatory’s atomic clock for time reference standards.
Cars that used Onstar or satellite radio would not even start, or stopped within minutes; some crashed. Planes fell out of the skies all over the world.
Several nuclear power plants melted down. Nuclear missiles went haywire.
Some of the programs had been perfected for years before the comprehensive attack was orchestrated.
It affected the News services so badly that the parties involved had to resort to circulating printed material to even take credit for the attack.
More than ten years earlier, the terrorists had begun a plan that was only waiting for the success of the computer viruses for their initiation. They were in no hurry.
The terrain of the area surrounding the Fort Knox Army base is riddled with underground caverns and streams that permitted tunneling through an area over five miles long from nearby Bardstown to the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox with a minimum of true excavation.
By a similarly ingenious plot, the mazes of sewers, communications tunnels and underground passageways in Manhattan (some dating prior to the revolutionary war) allowed near enough access to the Federal Reserve Bank, the only bullion depository larger than the one at Fort Knox.
Both tunnels ran the last five hundred feet deep below the vaults, working slowly and sporadically to better avoid detection.
The morning of the discovery of the cyber-attacks, at least twenty “dirty” or “salted” nuclear bombs detonated by two stolen B-61 Mod 11 nuclear “bunker busters” and a pair of ten-megaton hydrogen bombs of the Teller-Ulam design from former Soviet sources and several other devices of either Korean, Iranian, Chinese, Pakistani or Indian design under the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox and the Federal Reserve Bank of Manhattan.
Both locations enabled the surrounding bedrock to amplify the effects of the shock waves from the blast and the combined pressure and heat from the thermonuclear blast not only compromised both vaults, but also severely contaminated them with radioactivity.
The heat and pressure was so intense that the other “dirty” or “salted” devices were combined in a chain-reaction not normally anticipated in any previous counter-terrorism models, that assumed conventional detonation of plutonium and uranium, with no concomitant fission or fusion.
The terrorists had no desire to survive the attacks, so no shielding or protective casings were used to contain the radioactivity of the “dirty” or “salted” bombs. It was a suicide mission, which made it that much easier to accomplish.
“All the gold in Fort Knox” (and the Federal Reserve Bank of Manhattan) was now radioactive. The fact that they had been entirely symbolic ever since they had been stored there really had little bearing on the perception of the people of the world.
(Apparently, the terrorists had seen the Movie “Goldfinger,” although they were not interested in any financial gain; after all, within two days they possessed all the net worth of the all major powers of the world.)
They already had plenty of money, but the real point was to take it away from their enemies.
It is estimated that the gold at the United States Bullion Depository (aka “Ft. Knox’) is worth about 175 billion dollars. This is believed to represent 2.5 percent of all the gold ever refined in all human history. The US GDP is estimated at approximately eighteen trillion dollars, and the United States federal budget is set at approximately 103% of the GDP.
The attack was predominately a way of doing severe damage to the confidence of the American people in the liquidity of their government.
After all, most of the net worth of anyone or any entity is based on a combination of faith in what amounts to “virtual money,” rather than cash and the mutual recognition of what constitutes value.
Between credit margins, and speculation, in a cashless society most people rarely ever touch any “real” money. Paper money is based on faith and a promise, but keep in mind that when the economy went from gold to silver certificates to federal reserve notes they no longer bore the promise “payable on demand”.
And let’s face it, you can’t eat gold or silver if you are hungry. The value of gold or precious metals or gems are based on their scarcity, and almost since the beginning of time we have been hypnotized by our desire for them, rather than in any true intrinsic value per se.
And to the radical Islamics, the result of the end of Western civilization was their precise goal. No more Hollywood (or Bollywood), no more televangelism, no more beer or whiskey commercials, no more live lingerie models, no more TV, no more Western aggression; Zionism as a world power would be crushed; no more internet porn and no more Christmas specials on television. No publicly available electricity in the West.
In just two explosions they had bombed the Western Hemisphere into the stone age.
At least, that was the mythology that had become the accepted explanation. Most of the stories that were passed from one person to another verbally were based on speculation, rumors and whatever prejudice, preoccupation, or agenda of the teller.
A few amateur radio operators kept up their own news nets, but no one knew what to believe and if you were smart, you took it all with a grain of salt; after all, no matter what gossip you heard, most of it had no real bearing on your own current state of affairs.
They were all too often just the idle talk of the frightened and the doomed, who would have nothing else to say once the lives they had known evaporated.
North Korea had very little to lose; their governmental leaders lived lavishly, but the mass of people lived in squalor, in silence, and in the dark. Previous satellite photographs of the island of Korea showed a brightly lit south at night, but above the thirty-eighth parallel only a few scattered lights showed anywhere in North Korea.
India and China were similarly affected, but to a lesser degree. For the desperately impoverished masses who had so little to loose, it was a zero sum game.
And perhaps most importantly, No country seemed to have much need to muck about with the rest of the world, which for the most part had lapsed into complete isolationism.
Or so it seemed, until each of the countries participating in the attack on America and its allies tried to double-cross the other. They quickly rendered each other helpless and crippled with a combination of nuclear and conventional weapons.
First it was Russia and China, then India vs Pakistan, and everybody versus Korea.
The Moslems were not bound by national boundary lines, but religion and culture, and initially they stood together. In fact, it was later estimated that the Moslems had actually instigated the conflicts between the other countries with feigned mutual acts of sabotage.
But eventually even the Moslem-ruled countries turned on each other. The same mind-set that had sabotaged Thomas E. Lawrence (of Arabia)’s effort to unify the mid-east was still in effect.
Malaysia was the first to fall; they were the weakest, and the least unified as far as Islam. Once that chain-reaction started, it would have been very difficult to tell who “won”.
Gandhi had stated that “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind” but obviously, he was wrong…because…
“…In the land of the blind, the one-eyed is king”…and that last guy with only one eye could easily escape the last blind guy…(but if you are surrounded by radioactive glass everywhere you look with that one good eye, it’s not much consolation).
Perhaps even more fortunately each had sufficient intel about each other as to quickly and almost surgically attack each other so as to limit any counter-attacks by anyone, so other than some very localized fall-out, it had almost no effect on North America.
Perhaps ignorance is bliss…border disputes in Eastern or Western Europe or Asia had no real affect on someone living in Idaho…or the Florida Everglades.
Elliott had heard stories of people who still chose to live in the cities, bloodthirsty cannibals, burglars, rapists and bandits feeding like vultures on a rotting carcass that was already nearly stripped to the bones.
The trick was to find a place where only certain individuals could survive, and even thrive in the midst of world chaos. The desert, the mountains, the deepest woods, the most isolated coastal regions and their islands as well as the few swamps in North America…and the Florida Everglades, which were really more like a flooded savanna, hence the Seminole expression “River of Grass”.
Virtually all of what constituted an economy was now based upon barter, trade…and theft.
One thing that had not changed was that all too often keeping what you already have can be more difficult than getting it in the first place… “the same as it ever was….”
Those who had something of useful purpose as well as those who could do or make because of what they knew faired much better than those highly trained aristocrats whose careers and knowledge or training were so specialized that they had no survival skills at all.
It was a very bad time for lawyers, public officers, (like judges or government officials), CEO’s, any level of vice-president of much of anything, travel agents, airline stewardesses, motivational speakers, fitness trainers, life coaches, investment bankers, stock brokers, event planners, and pretty much anyone dependent upon performing services for someone else.
State governments were fucked, but the rich and privileged swine who had manipulated them all along just by virtue of what they still possessed; as long as they could continue to barter their influence over goods and commodities, at least had a chance.
The police almost immediately took over most of organized crime, and split what they couldn’t steal outright with those whose mutual interests might similarly prosper in deference to outright gang warfare, which nonetheless still flourished on a regular basis.
Our military forces faced mass desertions, but those who remained managed to maintain a small elite group of forces who operated much like Mosby’s Rangers during the Civil War, ‘’requisitioning” food and supplies as they deemed necessary. All the armed services bases that remained open had to become self-sufficient by hunting, plowing, planting and farming almost every inch of their surrounding land near their bases, including the livestock they now tended.
Elliot was fortunate enough to have worked out a deal with a group of similarly minded individuals who owned a large tract of land that bordered on the Florida Everglades; mostly dry and wet savannas with patches of scrubby timber and wooded areas.
They all had hunted wild hog and deer on those lands together at various times throughout the years. They all possessed and represented a wide range of useful skills. Most of them were what had been called “trades people”.
Most people would have derisively referred to them as survivalists.
Although they themselves had no idea what would precipitate what some would come to call The End of Days, they knew that eventually, something would happen.
They were essentially autonomous, and lived relatively well in an otherwise dystopian and dangerous world.
It was as if the tables had been turned.
Most city-dwellers as well as most suburban commuters not only could not survive outside their protected communities, but they would have little desire to live without the conveniences and trappings that had already enslaved them.
If you can’t seem to get what you think you want, learn to love what you have.

Chazz Vincent

March 19th. 2016