Report from the Provinces

Four months ago I moved to rural America. I am blissfully buffered from hours of irrelevant noise, simply because there exists no reliable satellite on cable service in my neighborhood. With my satellite dish scanning the heavens, an impressive three-feet wide, looking as if I could talk to Moon Base Alpha with no lag time, in reality on good days I view five to eight minutes of streaming or video, before my screens freeze, leaving me with blissful dead air.

I now fully appreciate the deficits of 21st Century technology, not fully built, not full capable. Being just a few miles beyond its reach, I relax in KARMIC SILENCE, as close to Buddha-hood as I am likely to get. Even the best-written, most touching and heart-wrenching propaganda does not reach my eyes or ears. To be precise, according to my local service provider, I am 3.4 miles beyond the reach of any network broadcasts.

Left to my own devices, I play a scratchy record of Schumann's Träumerei, from Kinderszenen, Op.15, composed in 1838, and recorded in this string arrangement in 1918. I played this old phonograph record on a hand-cranked Victorola, a model very popular between 1910 and 1930. I listen to this music on my back porch as I barbeque burgers. I also hear one crow some distance off, and a dog barking far in the background, mostly covered by the sound of wind moving among the branches of tall pines.

Left to my own devices. I have spend the past three months writing the stories I wish to read, the stories I wish to tell, my entertainment no longer reliant on Iowa Writer's Workshop graduates with jobs in New York or Hollywood, churning out finely crafted screen-gems with mostly unremarkable characters doing entirely predictable things, people I neither admire nor care about in any way.

Left to my own devices, I put beautiful, naked young women into the yurt in front of my house.

I make high-resolutions videos of the nude women reading poetry by Theodore Roethke, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg and e.e. cummings. I even bring out books of poems by poets of the 1980s,

W.S. Merwin, Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich and Gary Synder. When the girls finish reading they often masturbate themselves into loud orgasms.

I do not recall seeing this form of theater, nor hearing or seeing any first-rate poems at all, over the past thirty years in major or minor motion pictures. Expensive and well-promoted creations of Amazon Prime, Paramount+ and Netflix offer nothing at all like the entertainment in my yurt. I fill the long, religious silence with creative action, unlike what millions of households receive every morning, evening and afternoon.

When I drive into town and watch television at a friend's house, I realize I have missed nothing at all in four months. Covid got over with. But the instant broadcast news from New York City and Los Angeles remains the same. The same voices, the same faces, making predictable noises, with predictable facial expressions. The global leader featured on the Evening News remain essentially the same, except for a few who have dropped dead. Our own President still looks comatose or brain dead, but he has not yet dropped dead.

The other global leaders are saying much the same nonsense as they were saying last year. With the exception of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has been forced into apologizing to Aboriginal Peoples for the deliberate abuse now revealed with hundreds of unmarked child graves.

Truly, I tell better stories than that. Far more uplifting. In fact, I am nearly certain human civilization advances further, and attains higher planes of spiritual enlightenment in my yurt, than in all the Evening News broadcasts from all television and cable network across our planet. Our global leaders simply have nothing useful or inspiring to say. Not now. Not ever.

Left to my own devices, I can cause plenty of trouble, and think hundreds of inappropriate thoughts, thought which will never be mentioned on PBS nor NPR. I will never get the PBS/NPR stamp-of-righteous-and-artistic merit stamped on my bony little ass. Their audience will never see nor hear my young women reading first-rate poetry from a yurt in the provinces.