2025 Chapter Taking a Trip
Joe gets up and tromps into the forest. He stoops down, digs a shallow hole, carefully places the dirt bike upright in the hole with his left hand and sweeps the loose dirt over with his right, patting down the pile. A handful of leaves is arranged artfully over the mound. He squats by the hole and waits. Seconds pass. He puts his ear to the ground and listens. Returning to the squatting position, he closes his eyes. Moments pass, then more moments. Nothing happens. He sits down, folds his legs into full lotus position and half closes his eyes in meditation. More moments. He is startled and opens his eyes, looks around. He had drifted off, slept and dreamed. A slight scowl darkens his features, then a smile, remembering that he had dreamed of taking a leak, he still needed to. Joe gets to his feet, takes a self conscious look to the right and left and unzips his snow pants. With a grin and a sigh, he pisses on the mound, the leaves flipping and dancing under the stream. Joe's eyes are fully closed now, he is transported into the bliss of a long delayed urination.
A thumping explosion. A gout of dirt and roots erupt up into Joe's face and clothing. Joe's hand reaches out reflexively and grabs the throttle control of a full sized motorcycle. The machine, standing upright, was tipping over and about to fall towards him.
Joe's contact with the bike, his touch is catalytic. Electrons jiggle on the edge of existence, a great smoky cloud of charged fuzz bunches up between man and machine. Joe's essence, his life force, the gestalt of his entire persona, buffalo robe and all, flows down his forearm and into the bike. Joe is paralyzed, gripping the throttle. Unfolding before his unblinking eyes is pure chrome and speed porn, with intense gleaming close ups of arterial red plastic fenders being cooked into matte charcoal. The vinyl seat grows a carapace of black fur. Mirror finishes sparkle in a languorous and lingering pan. The forest floor offers a soft backdrop of rusty bokeh.
Electrons, muons, gluons, neutrinos, higgs bosons and such like, every energetic flavor ever imagined and then some pop in and out, tracing curlicue tails that flare and fade. A sparkling menagerie jiggles and jangles where hand and throttle once, long ago, were separate, completely different categories of things, man and machine. Now they form an arched timber foot bridge across a gurgling, laughing brook, a single ribbon across an unprecedented architectural epiphany, an arc of brilliant blue between anode and cathode. Joe's face is beautific, child-like with innocence and wonder.
Laser light flickers onto Joe's face. The last of the bikes cherry red plastic becomes a fierce beam of coherence, and begins to vaporize his beard. Joe snarls and grimaces, the process is happening deep within his skull, his entire body. The score kept within his flesh of past trauma and blame is resetting. His facial hair is being zapped, likewise a trimming back of loneliness and grief, a pageant of the countless incarnations unexisted, facets sent back to the respawn queue. So many one of a kind, bespoke designs, ingenious capsules of life burnt or crushed or vaporized. Characters deleted by a finger heavy on the backspace key, never again to explore theme park earth in quite the same way. The glow of health, the murk of disease, qlorious, quirky, mired and snarled in time and space, never again. Though every death is a suicide, though the deer willingly gives her life to feed the hunter and his family, loss cannot be mitigated, endings are absolute and final. The essence of the divine mystery is to be eternal, what mortal can conceive of persisting forever? Perhaps the mystery of mortality is in ending, that anything could once and for all finish, is a dire enigma.
Knowing and insight is being liberated by the laser playing across Joe's features, shaping his mustache into a swashbuckler's sharp slash, sculpting his scraggled beard into the goatee of an iconic rapier wielding pirate. The laser captures freeze frames of exultant epiphany, pleasure and pain are indistinguishable on his frozen face. He could be coming, wave after orgasmic wave crashing over exultant awareness, melting and swirling his presence, extracting the goo of confusion, the foam of fear, grains of precipitated discouragement, effecting a distillation of audacious enthusiasm, pragmatic competency and incongruous humor.
Joe teeters forward and back slightly, the intense winds buffeting his psyche have abruptly passed on. Holding the throttle as if it were the hilt of a sword, he kicks his left leg high up and over the bike, and slides onto the seat. The forest brightens, he had been in the dark before mounting the bike, everything seems to shine as if lit from inside, burning with color.
He gazes into the mirror, seeing his dashing visage, seeing himself for the first time, a smile playing in and around his lips.
He hits the starter, flicks his foot on the shifter, twists the throttle and flies, up and up, out of the trees, over the meadow and forests, the front tire a whirling blur of knobby geometry. A flash and forward, he is bouncing over hummocks of wilted grasses, snow. The landscape becomes a tunnel, curling around into a closed scenic cylinder and spiraling away. He is miniaturized, gigantified, duplicated and unified. He rides.
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https://why.movie/2021/08/08/motorcycle/ - [cherry red close ups eaten by black fungus. Do some tests with spare parts? Harvest and bag leaves for backdrop, super shallow depth of field.]