Dear Dirty America

ADAM MICHAEL LUEBKE
Los Angeles

The girl sitting next to me just started talking. Both of us sat at the bar, looking out the window, drinking our coffees and typing on our laptops. I had come to my favorite local coffee shop early, to get a good seat by the power outlet so I could plug in my old, weary computer while I worked.

Instead, I found a girl with porcelain white skin and very dark black hair in the spot I coveted. I sat next to her, even though the coffee shop was mostly empty. The air was humid from the boiling water. The smell of coffee thick and sticking in my hair.

Excuse me, I said, I have to reach over you. I plugged my computer into the outlet, just below the girl’s power cord. “My God,” she said, “the Internet is so slow here.” She held onto the word ‘slow’ deliberately, so I’d get the point. “I hate places with shitty Internet.” She looked past me, saw the empty chairs, and clearly wondered why I’d sat beside her.

Arab coffee shop, photo from TIMEA

At least the morning is very pleasant, I said. Sunshine. No breeze. Another L.A. beauty. And the coffee is good.

“I don’t take pleasure in nice mornings,” she told me, “because I have such terrible friends.”

It’s good mornings, I said, that allow me to put up with shitty friends all day long, and probably what allows them to put up with me. I held up a hand. That’s a joke, I said. My friends are great, the few of them I have.

She didn’t smile. “No, I’ve got lying, cheating friends. People who I thought cared about me. But they don’t.”

To save you, dear reader, from the rest of the story, I will summarize the following conversation this way:

The girl, I never did find out her name, launched into a horrible story about a gaggle of girls she’d been friends with for quite a few years. One of the friends, Annie — the most dreadful of the bunch, and the most coveted by men — began jokingly flirting with the girl’s boyfriend. And soon, as what sometimes comes with flirting, a love affair took flame and the girl’s friends sided with Annie over the fallout, and now the girl I sat next too had no friends, no boyfriend, and she’d been cheated out of “every sort of love possible” to a human being.

“I hate those bitches,” she said, “and if I ever see them again….” She trailed off, but she put her fist into her palm and ground it. An action I’d only seen men make.

You must have other friends, I said. Even the most irritating people have friends. Richard Nixon had his butler. Even when his own family hated him, he could still chat with the White House butler.

The girl continued to talk, to retell certain parts of the story, and rehash what she’d already railed against. She’d held my ear for twenty minutes or more, and I had to end the conversation. I also wished to help this miserable creature, defiant as she was.

With the banging of spoons, cups, metal containers, and cash drawers, and with the soothing hiss of the coffee machines all around us, I consulted all my inner training in these matters — matters of girlhood, deceit, a lover’s betrayal, and the hardships of being in your early twenties — and unleashed the following:

Can you imagine the disastrous effects this will have on your karma?

By you inflicting this vitriol from your personal life onto other innocent, pure people like myself, you’re going to do yourself serious karmic destruction, I said. If you don’t curb your negativity and train your mind to seek more positive thought patterns, your next life will be a doomed affair.

If I were angry or despised entire groups of people in my life, I’d find some interest in what you’re saying, and we’d bond over that hatred. But I don’t, I said. So instead, all this agony you’re throwing at me is bouncing off and hitting you again. The gods have shielded me from these kinds of psychic attacks. And if you keep this up, you’re never going to dig yourself out of the karmic pit.

The girl seemed like she had to cough. Did she have a tickle in her throat? The tendons in her neck flexed and relaxed.

I’m sick of you people thinking in terms of one lifetime, I continued. I’m tired of you people forgetting that right now, right at this moment, Saturn is spinning around the same sun that’s too bright for us to look at. There is an electric storm on Jupiter. On a planet in Zeta Reticuli there are, possibly, creatures who are similar to us, but a billion years advanced. And here we are, trying to enjoy a coffee and mental stimulation, and you’re all wrapped up in a dead-end set of emotions.

I breathed in deeply and let it out in her direction.

You’re going to end up, in your next incarnation, a sex slave in a poor, developing nation and be chained to the earth for one short lifetime pleasing the whimsical desires of debauched businessmen from great industrial nations who fly to impoverished places to get cheap, unused female hardware to satisfy their constant craving for jollies. Businessmen, I might remind you, who most likely lived pristine, thankful lives in the past, only to squander in this one the very generous wealth allotted to them.

She opened her lips, but kept her teeth clenched tight.

photo by Luke Ford

It’s important I tell you these things, I said. Take a good real world example of someone like this — Kim Kardashian. Those of us ignorant enough to think the physical world and our human bodies in this lifetime — and here I tapped her shoulder twice, with my first two fingers, to demonstrate that she’s nothing more than a meat puppet endowed with the breath of God — those of us who can’t see past our five senses and the material world ask this question: What the hell did Kim Kardashian do to deserve all the beauty and wealth and attention given her?

The answer, I said, is so simple it’ll make your jaw hurt. She might have been a prostitute in early modern England, or a housemaid who scrubbed floors all day and cooked dinner for her master at night. She probably lived a life so unselfish and innocent she could hardly strike one black mark onto her soul. A life of service to others, and she might have done it as simply as an ox steps in line by the farmer’s holler and lashing whip. No complaints, really. No spiteful feelings. Just dumb, innocent love and piety.

She might have given up her chance for happiness so her impoverished siblings could live more respectable lives. Or maybe she worked hard and died young trying to provide for her children. Perhaps one of the famous writers of that period based the character of a peasant woman on her, when he saw her groveling in the filthy alleyway, in the piles of shit and garbage, trying to retrieve a shilling thrown to her from a rich gent on a horse.

Hell, I said, maybe she lived multiple existences suffering through that misery and now she’s on a path of breathtaking generosity, handed to her from the Universe, or God, as some people say. Either way, Kardashian did something right many, many years ago, and is reaping the benefits this time around. Her blessings are enormous. Not many people can become famous for doing absolutely nothing. And even fewer good looking people are endowed with enough money to surgically enhance themselves to become the world’s most beautiful.

“I don’t see what this has to do with me,” the girl said. Neither do I, anymore, I said, but this is a thought that has to be seen through to completion.

photo by Eva Rinaldi

Even I’m turned on by Kardashian. I hate to admit it. But at her level, beauty becomes a formula. It can be manipulated, fostered, and finally tailored to attract men and women the world over. Nobody can help feeling the ancient flicker of primal arousal when Kardashian’s perfectly sculpted face is shown. Who can deny that sharpening of the senses, the increased blood pressure, the sweaty palms, the ringing in the ears, and the debilitating way the breath catches in the throat?

All this is to say that Kardashian very well might be squandering her sensational karmic wealth by buying up blood diamonds and being, essentially, the cutest damned leech or parasite the world’s ever seen, but I can’t say for sure. I’m made of blood and mud just like you and have little insight into cosmic reality.

“Do you think I look like Kim Kardashian?” the girl asked. Renewed interest seemed to brighten her gaze. Is that why I was talking about Kim? she seemed to be asking.

Not one iota, I said. And you’re going to look even less like her in your next incarnation if you don’t turn your life around. In fact, from the verbal assault you’ve laid into me this morning, I’d say you’d be lucky to come back as a human! You’ll be born looking like Barbara Bush. And that’s if you’re lucky. Otherwise you’re looking at having to reenter life as a squirrel or a woodchuck, I told her. But fortunately, it seems, God has placed me in your path at this moment to impart to you the right words, the proper advice.

The girl packed up her computer. Her white hands rapidly rolled her computer’s power cord and shoved it into her backpack.

I’m just getting warmed up, I said. Don’t you want to hear the rest? I can explain to you how your thoughts actually matter. How they make formations in subtler realms of less dense matter. A palimpsest, I guess, of various astral realms.

“Shut up,” she said. She hoisted her backpack over her shoulders.

Your thoughts accumulate until you’re walking beneath them like your own storm cloud, I said. I used my hands to illustrate. Except it’s invisible, so you don’t make the connection that you’re creating your own bad weather. But I’m here to tell you–

“Shut up!” she shrieked.

In a coffee shop! She let out a squeal so improper and unfair to the rest of the patrons I was embarrassed to have even been sitting next to her. The girl strode out. She gave me the finger as she walked by.

I held up my hands and looked at the rest of the coffee shop. It’s been my regular hangout. Everybody either knew me, or had seen me multiple times before. I was innocent, always had been. Kind, respectful, a fair tipper. The other patrons, the few who’d come in since I’d been talking with the girl, went back to work, or to the conversations they were having. The collective blame for the disruptive scene rested on the girl.

More bad karma, I thought, and on her already boggled mind. Did I do a service, or a disservice? I asked myself. Who can answer that in these complex, post-2012 times?

Did you feel the shift?

A friend had asked me on December 22 of last year if I had “felt the shift”. I assumed she meant a shift of consciousness from the fabled 21st of the Mayan calendar.

Well, yes, I said, now that you mention it, I did. And how very strange it was, I told her.

“Existence has just become more complex,” she said. “The chance for a higher evolution is upon us. Will the human species enter the Fourth Dimension?”

I know, I know, I said. You’re talking to the choir here. I felt the shift, I said again, I assure you, I felt it. It practically knocked my socks off.

“It shouldn’t have been that strong,” she said. Serious. “It shouldn’t have affected you like that.”

Tell it to the Universe! I said.

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