Dear Dirty America

ADAM MICHAEL LUEBKE
Los Angeles

I was nearly run off the road by an ambulance tearing down the street and hogging the center line. Its big black wheels rolled merrily across the yellow warning line. The street was on an incline, and my car climbed it, but the emergency vehicle was gaining speed on the decline. Head-on collision time. Parked cars on both sides of the street narrowed my opportunity for escape, and playing ‘chicken’ with public officials behind the wheel of a heavy red block of steel isn’t the other best option.

What to do? I asked myself in that split second before the impending crunch of steel and fiberglass and windshields (mine, at least). Nobody would’ve believed the ambulance had been the menace on the road. I would have been arrested for colliding with an important city vehicle. But at the last second the jolly red emergency vehicle corrected itself and I skirted past it with no fatal consequences. Just a flurry of psychological ones. How many car crashes and near misses can a person be in before he gets the point?

But what is the point? When your day starts off by nearly being squashed by an ambulance with no flashing lights, your stomach does a small flip, and your mind begins reeling through the tiresome series of deep, mythological dissertations on life and death and Purpose. You begin babbling your favorite lines from Ulysses and defaming your favorite Buddhist lecturers’ advice about pain and suffering.

Turn your lights on, you buzzards! I shouted out my open window. It’s unlikely they heard, but it was worth a shot. The Los Angeles Fire Department almost became the ‘Fired Department’ after they’d been scrutinized and condemned for their slower-than-the-national-average response times. But all that was redeemed in late May when the LAFD so quickly responded to, and efficiently handled the case of the pigeon impaled on the bird-keep-away spikes at the Metro station.

That was a win for the LA Mayor. He received the news with his morning cup of creamed coffee, and a letter containing his free celebrity tickets to the taping of American Idol’s next season. The night before, Mayor Villaraigosa had signed into effect yet another parking ticket increase for the poorest neighbors in his city. “It’s good to close the budget gap,” he said, “by charging people in this city who can barely afford their rent more for any possible kind of minor or serious parking violation.”

This is not the way I wanted this article to go. One sentence about the ambulance would have been enough, but now that I’m on a roll, I might as well keep going. This blog isn’t for serious social fact-setting like CNN. This blog delves into the deeper subconscious realms and knots together like gnarly old shoelaces themes and ideas far more truthful than bickering about how to interpret the CBO’s facts and figures.

Or the unemployment rate and the dismal monthly jobs reports. Barack Obama says: we have to look at it in the long-term. This administration has created millions of jobs since we took office. Mitt Romney says: the president is not doing the right job with the economy. Just look at yet another awful jobs report this month.

This isn’t to say the numbers aren’t real or calculated correctly. They might be. But in what context, compared to what other information (either truth or lies) is it being analyzed?

BOUND & GAGGED

Speaking of profound themes and tangled ideas, this blog receives a fair amount of traffic from seekers on Google typing in “bound and gagged women”. I don’t condone that kind of brutal sexuality. I don’t support anything being bound and gagged, unless maybe it’s a tofu-shaped turkey with a cherry in its fake beak. But even then, I’d have misgivings about eating it. Very little pleasure would be had on my part.

Yet, why do I get the bound and gagged crowd? I imagine it’s a haggard crew of intense endorphin junkies who are, if not already into, one step away from collecting snuff films. What on earth are in the archives here at Dear Dirty America that would allow my site to come up when that sort of filth is being searched? And what kinds of advertisements will be triggered as a result of me feeding into this slovenly phrase?

Although, I don’t mind the extra traffic. I could have never planned it being that way. Those kinds of people aren’t my crowd, but they are, after all, a crowd. Not a million strong, not yet. But I’ve been under extreme pressure to please the bound and gagged crew. They must be horrendously disappointed when they rifle through DDA and find nothing to give ’em their fix. When in the mood for vengeful, hate-filled lust, the last thing you want to read about is Newt Gingrich getting his testicles lopped off by Karl Rove’s henchmen, or, on an even more serious note, the amount of public spaces disappearing as wealthy corporations buy up every square inch of land and make people buy something before they can sit or lounge anywhere.

What can be learned from this? Be watchful of bad signs. Like careening ambulances, or sadistic sexual freaks who frequent the lower energies milling outside your domain. Whether you’re terrorized by public officials like the residents in Anaheim and most of Southern California, or two striking men show up at your door asking to fornicate with your sons, there is only one possible option.

Either God’s setting up a brutish experience for you, in the name of providing you with a ‘life lesson’. Or else this entire world is just an enormously complex series of ripe and raw nerve endings that connect or almost connect in an infinite way that only a supercomputer invented in the year 2119 can begin to untangle and explain.

The end result for me is to gently swerve my vehicle at any oncoming emergency vehicles. The trick is to avoid causing any possible chances for danger, but yet pull off the swerve just viciously enough to give the impression you’re the driver in control of the vehicle, and you’re dead serious about having your place on the road. Sometimes you have to make the testicles of the other driver uncomfortably tuck themselves up inside the body.

In this society, people respect that kind of playful, yet almost dangerous aggression. They’ll lock you up for it if you do it at the wrong times, or if you have too much fun doing it. But the key to life is to never lose control of your own environment, or let anybody else step on you or playact importance over you.

Step up off me, man!
Get up off me, you snake!

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