The Last Sunset

It used to be all zeros and fives, but it isn’t anymore: the game has changed. And the guesses haven’t. In the Barker Times, every car price ended in those two particular digits, it was just, it was fair; humid enough for snails, dry enough for laundry.

Everyone knew the zeroes and fives. Everyone expected this to continue, it was the wink- wink, nudge-nudge of the morning game show world. When did things get so vicious? When did car prices end in 2’s and 7’s? Why did they do it? What do they want?

She wears a floppy sundress and a hat with a homemade showcase showdown lectern atop it. She's eyeing this blue Nissan Versa very carefully, ignoring the screams of the studio audience entirely. She has one dollar left in the Lucky Seven's game, and she needs that dollar to buy the car. This last number in the car's price must be exactly correct.

"What'll it be, Loretta?" Drew coos.

She bites her knuckle, then whispers: "Five."

Drew gives no visible response, it's the right answer, the just one, the one we've been taught, and maybe Drew Carey knows all that. But it's wrong, the last number for the Versa is a three.

A three! Car prices don't end in threes.

I’m yelling at the television now. At the DVR, oh you mighty cable brain disk, above all. Give me answers.  Your blue eyes only take you so far; your dreams are still mine.

And Carey! Have you forsaken us? You know there’s an injustice here, a cosmic shaft collapse in the spine stew of pricing games. You are no carny, you are a professional. Things round up or down. Have the capitalist mind scanners gotten to you too? Sucking the soul out of our last bastion of sanity like fish tank algae. God damn it, this is our only chance. I’ve defended you so often, my candles burn, a dollar each, late, filling the salt soot with chemical infection, allowing me to see in the night. You’re the Pierce Brosnan of Price is Right hosts; that’s a tremendous responsibility.

This change in pricing games is a slight shift in the rhythm and drift of distant icebergs, but one nonetheless.

This is my last sunset, the final light before dark. I have nothing left to give here. There are still hills to take, but this one I’m giving back. It never had a theory, never had a formula, but it had something, and whatever that was, that adolescent lust, is gone, and not to be found again. So seal it off, sort it, give it a statistic; I’ll love and miss you always.

I wrote the above on a cocktail napkin late one night at a bar filled with only the elderly and bikers, than ate the napkin.

Three days later I sat on my balcony, listening to the vibrating grind of the nearby ocean; counting the planes in the sky that flew south, specifically. Jasmine colored butterflies and wasps that sing Mississippi Delta Blues at dusk. Reading my books, scratching my skinny arms, distant and distracted, firmly taken off the Mainline and re-inserted in some cosmic vegetable platter whose dip was acidic and led to heartburn; the sun was hot and close, an enemy and friend, that which was concrete and perhaps false.

Things were static; proven, just. Like I had stolen a precious old painting and everyone had forgotten. And that painting was in a safe, that I knew, calmly, was never going to be cracked.

There are two rocking chairs on my balcony; both face east but also slightly south. Towards to the ocean, towards the moonrise and rocket blasts, sea turtles and ghost crabs. The chair next to me is empty on this day, as it can be, rocking lightly in a sea breeze.

And I looked right, the chair still empty, looked down and sipped from my tall drink of vodka and Fresh Florida OJ and looked back up again. A Google Mercenary appeared; rocking slowly back and forth, facing southeast, toothpick tweezing in one hand, clenched fist as the other. Well, well, well, the Nick of all Papagorgio’s.

“We hear your gonna stop writing the Long Sunset pieces,” he growled.

“Stopped a long time ago, I’d say. Haven’t posted anything on there in over a year,” I replied casually, undeterred by his sudden hallucinogenic appearance. Cars in the turning lane, do indeed, usually turn.

“We noticed. We gave up on you a long time ago though, so we shrugged at the numbers. We can always find more numbers.”

He had a toothpick in his left hand and idly scrapped at caps in the teeth of his lower jaw, which I couldn’t help but notice in the bright afternoon sun, were colored green, blue, yellow and red. Slick bastards.

“Well, doesn’t affect me either. Say le vie. I’ve got my sights on other projects,” I mumbled.

“Like that short story? It sucked.”

“Was a metaphor.”

”A metaphor in sucking, we’d say. Existential bone dust, I think my review remarked.”

“You review literature?”

“Apparently not,” he smirked.

My cheeks were hot and flushed. I was trying to disguise it but I was worn out: by the day, by the days, by the mornings, the nights, the weekends, the hunt; the spiritual conquest that gives consciousness meaning, weight and brutality. Pelicans who try to taste their mackerel. He’d caught me at a bad time.

“So why are you here? You said you don’t care that I stopped posting the Long Sunset-“

“We don’t.”

“-you know I’m 30 now? I’m not even sure this bit is funny anymore.”

“Look it’s not,” he said as he leaned forward and flicked his toothpick into my finely maintained and densely fertilized garden, causing me to wince slightly. “But it never was.”

“So what than?”

“This Drew Carey business. It has to stop.”

“What?”

“You know how many people watch the Price is Right, still?”

“Couple million maybe.”

“Nope. Try a couple thousand. It’s been cancelled for 15 years on network television. We broadcast it into a very specific and targeted amount of households as a ‘specialty product’ ” (and he used the air quotes) “We maximize consumer purchasing trends. The show is only supposed to be viewed by true freaks of the American Capital class, of which, you used to be. Carey is in on the whole thing, he gets a cut.”

I didn’t believe him, and yet knew that every word was absolutely true.

“What, you thought Google made all that money every time people hit the search button? How would that even work? That’s a phantom industry peddled by the media elite. The real money is still in daytime network television programming. Always has been.”

Made sense, actually.

My neighbor biked by on her way to the beach, I waved, she waved back. The Google Mercenary flashed a single thumbs’ up at her. She didn’t respond to it. Or so the best I could tell. Dangerous times.

“So what, you forgot to turn my signal off?”

“Nah, we don’t make mistakes like that buck-o. Guess we just hoped you’d come back around at some point.”

“To what?”

Now he sighed and leaned back in my rocking chair; facing east, the ocean-breeze gently moving his thin brown hair around as if it were magnetized by a piece of metal at a place where his brain would ostensibly be. He almost looked concerned, if he had that in him, which I doubted.

“I don’t know. Anyway, this is the last one you were saying?”

“May just be.”

“Not just being dramatic?” he leaned forward with his hand covering his mouth in the direction of the street, “Or drunk and dramatic”, then he leaned back, hand removed, “because we’ve seen both, and are tired of each.”

“Well probably at least a little of both. But that is my intention, this is the last sunset.”

“All right then. Hope you have backup plans.”

“By the way, is that why Barker quit?”

”We killed Barker, he didn’t quit. Rolled down the electric Plinko of life, kimo-sabie. He went softly.”

“He hasn’t even died in real life. He’s still alive.”

“Pff,” the Mercenary sniffed “You really think he’s alive at 92 after all that scotch and unrestrained pussy we put on him? Guy was 22 when World War II ended.”

I didn’t like it. It was true, but I didn’t like it. He was being rough, disregarding any formality. He knew the game was up, the fat was finally in the fire, the time to move on had actually come. So I was getting the full view, the parts of the cavity the dentist discards before you can get a good look, and I didn’t want anymore.

Not only that, but I wasn’t sure what he wanted to hear.

To digress quickly, I started this blog - a word that still gives me tremors; but that would be an entire different dissertation on the difficulty of explaining yourself as a writer when that’s not where your paychecks come from - one night in my room facing west at my apartment in Northpoint. A vibrant place, infused with animals, drugs and distant airplanes. I used to sit by the window and listen to families of deer as they trotted across one of East Orlando’s last piece of pure unrefined natural brush swamp. You’d hear them racing each other, the smaller doe’s footprints tapping at a higher frequency, distant on a cool fall night.

Then the raccoon's would show up and we’d feed them. We named them. They had characteristics. There were armadillos and skunks and maybe bears. One night I was certain a prop-plane had crashed out in the isolated dark swamp; it had not. After heavy rains I tried to fish off the porch but my line never made it to the waters edge. One night we blew out the fire sprinklers by accident and the place flooded. We became the raccoon's.

I was living in a tree house on a sinking swamp.

I learned that you could listen in to the air traffic control of Orlando (MCO) online, and then watch, while looking out my western window, as the city lights growled with the human orange heartbeat, as the planes distantly came into view. The conversations between pilots and controllers were always routine, and routinely quite boring, but yet, amazing; modern metal tubes gracing the humid scrub with humans fully at control.

There were some good times, some fun times, a lot of them actually, and than also there were many nights when I could not leave my room, and hid from the stars of another static night. All dissolved in the electronic jellyfish glue.

I posted a surf forecast.

The Long Sunset became, unwittingly, a composition of my life through my twenties. Drinking, politics, Florida, dental surgery, comedy bits, more politics, rants, some fiction, pieces of my life, my mind and fingers.

My brother died. The Long Sunset became an outpouring of grief, a well with which there was no bottom, and no water. I miss him in ways I’m not clever enough to produce language for, and I can no longer find the place within myself to write about him and his meaning to me. Not here, and not yet. I think I did actually have that touch at some point; but it has been lost, evaporated with the compression of time and the weariness of the soul. He was here when these pages came to life, and lived throughout them; an imprint that was unclear in its definition, but total in its truth.

I am proud of the things I wrote about him in these pages. I hope they remain here always. In the ether; the candle wax that never burns away.

And there is more, much much more. I’m proud of some of it, and can’t read all of it.

Writers in the 21^st century have one thing acutely in common with each other: they can’t escape what they’ve done in the past. This isn’t a new or insightful commentary, but there was a time before the internet when something written was either a.) published, therefore at least thoroughly vetted, and probably somewhat good; to the writer and at least one other person or b.) was buried in the writer’s “papers”, and only to be set free to the public under circumstance of death or taxes. Well, well, well, the 22-year old writer that was me has already published a kick-ass version of his papers online, and he even did it, helpfully, when he was 22.

It’s difficult for someone following a link to this site to appreciate the spectrum of the writer and the person that shows up as they scroll. Even with the years clearly marked and docked; there’s a stamp of solidarity in that I must take account for everything written here over the years, and equally, that everything written can be shown within the harsh light of what was put down before it. I link this page in my e-mail signature, which can, sometimes, be sent out to serious people with serious thoughts, and I have no ability to act as a guide to the pieces that I still believe in. That’s the essence of every published writer, of course, but The Long Sunset has never been published: paper has never baptized the words and certified the content as it only can.

This place is something slightly different, but it feels no less important. It may actually be more important.

In saying that, I feel the need to start on a new platform, in this new decade of my life, and continue my writing there. And the one thing my generation truly and deeply understands at this point, perhaps more than any that has come before it, is the platform. I think we will all just continue to reinvent; we now have the ability to do so on an immediate level. I’ll be back somewhere soon, in my next evolution as a writer, and I look forward to that.

The Long Sunset will remain here, I would never delete it, but it will stay in stasis; in a green water filled tube slowly being laser-cut with a Death From Above tattoo. And for who knows how long: bits of early millennial digital graffiti twisting and spinning down the dark parade route of infinite communication. I will always love it, and I wish it the best.

I’m looking to refocus and recommit. I don’t feel I can do it here; that’s not a judgment to these pages, but its where am at. Wherever that is.

“Are you done?”

“What?” I’d zoned out. Did I say all that out loud?

“You’re just rambling, you lunatic, open your eyes. That building is on fire!”

I stood up from my rocking chair and leaned forward on the balcony looking north and east towards the nearest tall structure. He was right: A tremendous building was burning in the distance. Great flames danced and spun into the sea breeze air; you could see people calling out for help, plants wilting on windowsills. The mercenary joined me on the ledge and I could see tremendous fear in his generally sanguine face. Did he see this coming? Did he know this was the end? Smoke drifted west, dark red pelicans circled the building; its dimensions warping and collapsing with each fresh burst of oxygen that fueled the inferno further.

“What can we do? Can we help?” I said, slightly panicked. I’m always slightly panicked.

And that fear that was there, just for that instant, the crack in the seawall that allowed me to see a single moment of the mainframe, was entirely gone. It was replaced, as all things are, as they must be, by a furious look of intense hope. He grabbed me by my shoulders with a grip and a grin: “Of course we can.”

He clicked both hands simultaneously and pulled a flare gun out of his suit: it shot straight pole-ward and bloomed like a lotus flower into blue, green, yellow and red flaming balls. The sun was getting lower on the horizon, the fire was burning distant and true, the wind had come to be perfectly still.

Of course, a helicopter darted in low and fast down my block; cutting around raised PVC sprinklers and buzzing the top off of every hibiscus tree. It landed with the precision of a Russian figure skating team in the front lawn, rotors still grinding, pilot at the helm gnawing at yet another toothpick like he was a pencil sharpener, his face generally indistinguishable from the hallucinatory mercenary that stood next to me, who at this moment, slapped my back and said simply, “let’s do it.”

We went through the apartment and down the stairs. All the windows in my place were open now; the rotors were blowing everything around: papers, pictures, books, lamps, rum, hair, dog toys, a telescope, the married couple that live next door, sitting at their dining room table still, waiting for a revolution and finally getting it.

As we ran out the door I grabbed one specific picture out of the air, and stuffed in my back pocket. It was of a dog and girl.

“Go, go, go, go.”

We piled in and took straight off. The two suits said not a word, communicating only in a complex series of eyebrow gesticulations. We rose up quickly from the flat land of the thin island. The smell of smoke was quick and immediate. I had no fear.

The ocean below, to our east, was purely flat; a vast distant azure blanket of secrets only skin divers knew.

At some point we were over the burning tower, it was dissolving below us like a sand dune. We couldn’t see people inside, at this point, but they must be in there.

“Now, what?” I asked. The mercenary put over-sized headphones over my ears and pointed at them calmly.

Very clearly now, I could hear his voice and it alone: “We stole this from Musk. He owed us one. Did you know the Telsa was actually the first Google car?”

I shook my head.

“It was. You ever read his stuff about interstellar travel?”

Before I could answer, he held up a hand and began to speak to someone else in his headset.

”Seventeen seconds out? Roger that. Modulation? Six point eight? Are you sure?”

He flashes me a thumbs up, and makes a goofy impressed face.

“Thanks boss.”

Taking his suit jacket off now he taps the identical looking helicopter pilot on the shoulder, who looks back at him and without saying a word, nods, then salutes me, then does a barrel-roll out the open-air door into a straight freefall. I couldn’t see if he landed.

And the suit jacket isn’t actually a suit jacket, I see now, it’s a dark black kite. He throws it out the side door and begins to let it filter out.

”Location of the modulation is at a premium. The kite is a marker. Is this to much plot? I don’t want to ruin your little story,” he says. “Oh, and hold onto something: eight seconds incoming. My name is Rocco, by the way. Not number one.”

I hear a distant orchestra come to life now, the strings sound beautiful. The sun is glowing bright gold; taking its final stock of things for the evening.

And I look out east and see the ocean stirring suddenly to life. From the north and the south the water seems to be coming together and rising, the shoreline is pulling out and exposing an uneven sandbar, the eastern horizon becomes obscured and less than trustworthy. Physics working on a quantum scale: things that are not possible, proving themselves to be just that. Aquatic faith at it’s maximum and most delirious. 

A tower of water has risen out of the sea that matches the burning building that rests on the dune in front it to the square inch. And it begins to advance, a column destined to hit its mark, built for nothing else.

Suddenly smoke no longer rises from the flames, and the flames themselves lose their physical animation. It all becomes still. Waiting for the moment of impact. There can be no doubt now. History is but a mutually agreed upon fable.

It isn’t quite a wave, but an aquatic cylinder, I don’t have the budget to pay for anything more complex. And I’m at this point no longer sure, nor do I even care, at this late hour, who’s actually flying our Google helicopter. I just sit there, headset on, vodka flowing in my heart valves, mind numb and soft, sweet and limber, as that brick of saltwater advances on the burning building, fifteen stories in height but so very fragile.

When the wave hits the building, there’s a thud, and then casually, the great volume of water transforms immediately into a pale light mist. And the fire is out. Just like that.

I look west and see the final speck of the sun before it disappears to the dark side of the earth.

“Not bad, right?” He says.

We’re on the ground now. We landed. Everyone is filtering out of the building, slightly wet, but no worse for harm. They come out in pairs, laughing and gesturing towards the sky and ocean. Trying to explain to each other what they saw and where they have been. If humans still made pyramids, this incident would make a hell of a hieroglyphic.

My old friend looks pleased, but in that moment I can’t help but wonder if he, in fact, started the fire. And maybe I’m showing that suspicion on my face, because his mannerism go suddenly flat, he looks me right in the eye and then takes his sunglasses off. He does have normal eyes, in turns out, emerald green ones, and they can see the dusk falling between every palm tree.

“Do you really want to know?”

It’s a good question, it’s the question. It is the long sunset.

I think I say no; procrastination being my general default setting, but before I can answer I realize I’ve been transported back to my balcony, sitting in my rocking chair and facing east, watching as a faint glow cracks the surface of the horizon to the east, and that radiant glow slowly spreads to every corner of every place I’ve ever known.

And it’s dawn now, but for only so long.