Polarity is the Pulse in Phoenix

OK, let's set a few ground rules. First of all, this living novel isn't going to be one of my long sad odes to lost love. Looking for something a little more life-affirmin despite, as I said before, the forty days of fire, forty day of rain. Let all of that stuff wash this planet clean, I say. Good riddance.
Nor is this series of honest entries going to be overly metaphysical. I know, it can't be avoided. As the metaphysical blends with the physical, as it always has, we can at least grasp all things as one whole, and leave it at that. All religions are one, Blake said, and that shall be the central core of the moral code here.
That being established, the real meaning behind all this is the essential idea that global warming is a proven reality, and despite the fact science has yet to confirm it, we can rely on our own empirical experience, our subjective sensitivities, to guide us. Any animal has this power. We humans shouldn't deny it, either. Our instincts are telling us everything we need to know. Feeling shook up? Sure you do. If you don't, well, aren't you lucky. You must live in some high-class castle somewhere, with a bank account growing rich from the pilfering of the globe and its underclass of citizen servants to the machine mind. I know, you smile, in social darwinist glee, don't you, thinking there's nothing but money that flows like some kind of river or holy ghost that dictates the true realities of the global engines, and all of the rest of us, with nothing but spirit to hone, are just flapping around in the narcotic gods of our overactive imaginations.
OK then, you have your reward. Drive your Hummers into the sunset with glee. Carve up the valleys and canyons to your hearts' content. Vote red. See red. Drain blood. Carry your U.S. Marine guarded pallets of cash up and down the streets of Bagdad like a parade of caskets, for all I care.
You have your reward, you fucking vampires!
Now, for the rest of us, there is nothing but time to hone the spirit. Just know this: All televised visions of the apocalypse are irrelevant. As long as we are at one with the Creator, there is nothing to fear. Fear nothing, and nothingness will run.
So here we go, the moral and material pulse are openly presented and established. Time to move forward.
*****
We begin our day in Phoenix, just fresh from the largest Latino demonstration against some kind of proposed state legislation that, to hear the agents of La Raza describe it, sounds like some kind of Nazi pusch to rid this place of more than half of its population. On March 24, 2006, 20,000 citizens of real actual America, most of them more than likely so-called "illegals," showed their faces at 24th and Camelback to create the largest mass demonstration in state history. Throughout the day, all traffic in Phoenix was ground to a halt and consumerism took a heavy blow, as a result. Sure, I saw a parade of little Latino guys pushing those musical ice cream carts up and down the street, and thought I caught a whiff of ricin in the air while trying to negotiate it all in a white rented truck, but actually it wasn't too bad of a day to find Phoenix: A bundle of neverous polarities.
I left it that way. Now it has intensified. Figures. But, O my sweeties, how it made me forget about the beauty of the craggy desert I'd driven through. It made me forget about the little burghs of trailer parks, tire fix outlets, shanty little restaurants, and that whole weird world of citizens who are off the grid in the deserts of America. We can only imagine who they are. Good people, mostly, since most people are basically good. But they must be an anti-social bunch. If anti-social means avoiding the streets of Phoenix, though, then I can certainly relate to the gripe.
Anyhow, it sure made the clean-as-a-whistle resort marketplace of Lake Havasu City an attractive idea as a living choice, moonish as it is. A pile of rocks is what the Queen of Lake Havasu calls it. To which a daydream of the coast returns to the back of my head, memories of our next-to-last night in Lincoln City:

Egyptian bachelors
carting guitars
skinny and wise
as Dutch masters,
Filipino blood rising ...

He wrote up hieroglyphics
as a message to the Queen
of Jehu, of the Nile
as the faces of single malt
deities glimmer and danced
in front of the Stars & Stripes

The American flag, the grapes,
the gripes, the grapes, the wrath,
I threw my credit card
to the bartender
never counting my cash

The room clears, late night
a medley of the classics:
Your CC&R, your Rolling Stones,
as a moronic beer bath
leads to rock-solid thought

What we unlearn
tells us a lot

Pale bejeweled prancer
upon a dome upon the rock,
late at night old men hold
on tight to all that's lost,
as the young women walk
past them, gone, outta sight!

- Phoenix, Arizona