Dialogue with an Irish fly

Greetings,

“Your machine, memory and imagination are your friends. Keep them clean, sleep with them. Remember to take out the garbage. That’s the advice your old buddy Mike, your old fishing buddy, said years back, or was it in the future he told you? I can’t remember exactly, it’s all a blue blur," said the fly.

"You’re in a place full of archetypes, spirits and dancing death."

“Cast a cold eye on life, on death, horseman pass by” and all that said Mr. W.B. Yeats.

Mike reminded him to take out the garbage. Cut out the the vague shit and remember the reader doesn’t want to work too hard.

Always fondly reminding him of this truth.

The fly goes into cardiac arrest. “My god! A fly fisherman. You gotta be kidding!”

“Yes speaking of fly speak. He uses you to snare trout skis. No worries, he ties his own flies. He was talking about revision. Yes. Finding the thread in the story as we work through and wander along the labyrinth with the ancient clew of our pilgrimage.

“When he isn’t writing a collection of stories about growing up in orchards full of sweet delicious oranges, working in his garden planting future salads or pounding pavement and isolated paths near Colorado tributaries to prepare for the pleasant torture of Hawaiian iron man events, he defends humans in Cuba.

“He argues for a living. He’s busy filing appeals when illegal Military Tribunals sentence clients to death. Execution. It’s a job.”

“We are all in various stages of appealing sentences,” said the fly recovering from a comma.

“Here. Read my mind.”

He tends thorns in life’s rose garden wondering if people scheduled for execution on death row see the complete impermanence all around them. Maybe they see everything shrinking down to a finite particle of light reflected as rainbow spectrums zoom across the sky. Maybe people on death row just breathe, sit quietly in their cell and experience detachment.

“Maybe," said the fly, "they live in the eternal frozen moment of non duality with complete lucid clarity until the executioner wearing a black hood with eyes burning so bright, so close he can see where warp and weft meet, throws a switch.”

“Electricity? Public utilities? Deregulation of energy sources. Prayer wheels turned by water for hydroelectric power fingers sliding to the switch, the button on the console, transportation rooms filled with prisoners sitting on thin mattresses near cold metallic sinks, shoes carefully arranged, eating freeze dried popcorn, staring at calendars with Aztec and Mayan sun gods designating virgins through family genealogy destinies threaded together on looms of acid pellets sliding into a ceramic dish spinning inside a wheel of gas?

“Injection? Hypo syringes dripping toxins, lethal molecules, subatomic particles of Technicium or TC-99 from Hanford’s Nuclear Reactor seeping a slow death into the Columbia River and passing camels through a needle’s eye into deserts watering solitary confinement.”

The fly had heard enough. “In Texas they call it the barbecue pit where Friday is fry them alive day. The Bush throws the switch.”

Peace.