Sonic Sega Hipster Genesis

Bald eagles are gigantic. One flew over my house yesterday and it was striking just how big the damn thing was. Two Osprey’s were tailing after it; squawking and giving it general hell. But they together took up about a wing each compared to the eagle, and seemed to be causing it more amusement then concern. Most people are surprised when I tell them there are bald eagles around coastal Florida, but they’re actually relatively common.

Basically they’re just giant fish hawks, and all they really need to survive is a steady diet of terrestrial and aquatic vermin, plus some tall flat trees. Florida has these things in spades. For some reason (can’t imagine why) we have this ingrained vision of bald eagles sitting atop mountain peaks, soaring around Yosemite or sitting on Abe Lincoln’s giant forehead. But they aren’t condors: mountains and crisp pine trees aren’t on their requisite list for living somewhere. As long as we’re not dosing them in DEET, or shooting at them all the time, they pop up in fairly healthy numbers.

So I drove slowly under its broad shadow, the hulking beast, that beautiful bastard. And really I was a bit mesmerized; somewhere deep in my cerebral cortex a washed up Lee Greenwood played a meth-fueled version of God Bless the USA. This country started on good ideas, god damn it, and this giant Bald Eagle proved it more then anything ever could. I was about to start weeping, well, not weeping, but crying with patriotism as the beautiful bird soared due west, and into the infinite. My car was driving itself along Surf Road without any labor on my part, as I actually ride the thing at this point, like it's a lightly supervised carnival roller coaster, more then actually move it myself. And I stared upward, focusing on the dark shade of its wings sliding above me, and then out beyond into the ether, into that place that Tom Wolfe grew up trying to describe but put to many words into.

A Vespa with two hipsters on it turned the corner off Oak, and I was zapped out of my Red, White and Blue trance just in time to swerve around them.

Barely avoiding mowing into the hipsters on a Vespa.

Hipsters on a Vespa.

Hipsters on a Vespa?

Hipsters on a Vespa!

I smashed down on my accelerator and blew the wheels out into a smoke filled 180 burn in the middle of the road, crushing the yellow safety sticks in my path, grinding and killing the lives of small insect, and I powered the little Hyundai up-road in fierce pursuit of these bastards.

Hipsters on a Vespa? This would merit thorough investigation.

There was commotion ahead. Dust and misplaced tattoos. David Lee Roth solo albums being spun for ironic reasons. I thought I was losing them. My heart bled at the thought of it. Grapefruits from the last remaining trees in this town leaked purple, signifying defeat.

And then I focused my laser eyes. Along the side of the road my Google Mercenaries had apprehended the hipsters. I let out a lung full pride and desperation.

As I pulled up they’d stopped squirming in the arm restraints the mercenaries had smoothly embraced them in. I dropped the cigarette I started smoking during the chase (and had in my car only for such chases) and stomped on it squarely with the heal of a the cowboy boot that I’d struggled on halfway down the block (only for this moment).

My mercenaries had them sitting Indian style (fine, Native American style) in the front lawn of some ancient old widow that lived in a gemstone covered house that anchored our neighborhood. She’d come outside with her cane, a can of donkey mace, three hits of mescaline and a small pistol hidden in her large vanilla underwear. Shaking and spitting; she demanded justification.

“Don’t worry ma’am, these fiends will pay,” I said.

She nodded. “I’ve got two helpings of Velvetta on the stove if you’d like it, and my grandson is playing Sonic. He needs help with a difficult stage. Genesis of course. Sonic Sega Hipster Genesis. Velvetta.”

She made little sense. One of my mercenaries plunked her in the forehead with a full grapefruit he’d found rolling in the cracked pavement of the poorly paved street. It settled her down, or at least knocked her unconscious.

I turned the hipsters now dislodged from their Vespa.

Textbook case.

“They’ve been tagged, sir,” Mercenary twenty-seven whispered (twenty-seven! has it gone this far?)

“Indeed,” I said.

I squatted to their level.

“Where did you hipster’s buy this Vespa?”

“Outside a crafts store in Sante Fe, you facist.”

His girlfriend wiggled out of her plastic blue, red, yellow and green handcuffs and started smoking a Newport. She rubbed a tattoo of Yoko Ono’s face that covered her shoulder with her other free hand. One of my mercenaries moved forward quickly, in basic reaction, but I held two open palms in the air.

“Sante Fe?”

“Yeah brother, has a snakeskin odometer, but it’s synthetic, no snakes were harmed,” the boyfriend said.

My eye caught Google Mercenary thirty-four running a single finger across his neck in a slashing fashion. He had a big terrible grin on his face.

I shook my head reluctantly.

“Why are you swine here?”

They ignored me. I’d been tracking Hipsters on Vespa’s Daily for three and a half years. The population had exploded 15-fold, most were new, some had already been tagged and tracked. They we’re like Vegan humpback whales.

“Collecting air samples,” the heavily pierced redheaded girl finally said as she slowly ingested her cigarette.

“And I’m trying out for the local arena league football team. Not seriously of course, just a lark, although I think it’ll expand my-“

I zoned him out and spun around to my Google Mercenaries. They wore full dark suits and dropped not a bead of sweat in the early fall heat. A small brown lizard scooted across the road, and Mercenary 27 grabbed it and ate him whole in one vicious movement. He never chewed.

“And just what are you two doing here?” I said.

“Keeping lively discussion,”

“Yearly review,”

Twenty-seven breathed in deeply, and then spit a small fleshless lizard skeleton into his hand and seemed to admire it momentarily. Then he put it back in his pocket.

“What are the grades?” I said.

“Poor.”

“Do we need to get into this now?” I said. I was drunk now. It just happened. I was injected with the sizzle of something crisp and smoothing. The angles of the block around me warbled and pitched. Bright white crows circled overhead.

“Not really. We’re not sure if you’ll ever get into it.”

A storm rolled in instantly with terrible vibrations, and the wind began to pick up and whine. It slapped into the town’s tall palm trees like a moldy card deck in the hands of a lazy blackjack dealer. A grey coyote ran by, he had Charles Nelson Reilly’s face but the legs of a deer. He hissed at us as he trotted east, towards the ocean, towards things he couldn’t handle and would soon wish he would have my help with. And I wouldn’t give it. I’d watch the coyote drown and enjoy the struggle.

Now it started raining. The drops pounded down and they made the coyote cry from miles away.

“Hey, ky-zer, you gonna let us go or what? It’s raining pretty hard, and they’re showing Stand By Me at a drive in theater in Birmingham tomorrow night and we have to be there,” the tied hipster said.

“It’s uncorporate,” his Newport smoking girlfriend added as she looked north.

I stood in the middle of the road, no cops, tons of fear, no ice-cream men, no drugs, sand crabs tickling my two long flat feet, old ladies dying all around me, watching as everything die around me, feeling that I could change the story, which would, in itself, be a story, and one that no one would ever read.

And even if it did get passed on, it could only get passed so far. Because at some point, everything only gets passed on so far.

Five of us stood alongside that road, some handcuffed, some stern, most confused. The rain splintered the sky around us relentlessly. I didn’t know what to do. Stage lights flashed on and off.

But then, the Bald Eagle returned out the black sky, and the rain stopped completely. Everything dried up instantly.

And the bird soared true and fast. Moving air as it pleased, hoping smaller birds and prey would get in its path. It set the compass South, and assumed all would be fine in those comforts, as it had no reason to assume otherwise, but if it thought deep, if it thought beyond the next meal and the next mirror, it would remember what it flew over. The eagle would then land and never fly again.

Or so I would assume. I could feel the air from its wings hit every pore on my skin as it went over for a final time. The mercenaries had left at the first site of the thing, perhaps in fear, but I couldn’t understand why. They may have taken the hipsters with them, may not of, but either way the whole lot of them vanished under the glare of the eagle. And just as well.

And the world around me was covered in grapefruits.