Dibs & Dabs

Sting is playing the County Bowl tonight and the crowd is filing in. The marine layer was heavy all day, but the sky is clear now and it looks like a pleasant evening for a concert. Music beneath the stars in Santa Barbara. The crowd is mostly white, affluent looking, and orderly. These people don’t shout and whistle like the lower classes do for other acts, and the police haven’t seen fit to roll out additional units to maintain the peace. Sting is safe, mellow, not a menace to public safety. Our local gangbangers don’t care about Sting.

My government is going to prosecute Bradley Manning to the hilt and lock the young man away for life. So long, whistleblower, we’ll show you what becomes of people who spill state secrets. Straight into the American Gulag, never to be heard from again. Once we’re done with you, we’ll figure out a way to get your mate, Assange. He can’t hide in the Ecuadorean embassy forever; sooner or later he’ll slip up, and when he does, we’ll have him snatched and extradited, and he’ll get the full Cheney treatment. He won’t act so cocky when we ram a cattle prod up his rectum. Teach him to fuck with the U S of A.

It’s a wonderful world. The sky is blue, cloudless, and Sting is playing the Bowl. High heels echo off the sidewalk. Date night at the Bowl, overpriced chardonnay in clear plastic glasses. What could be better? Early summer on the American Riviera.

Sting has begun his show with a familiar tune but I couldn’t name it if my life depended on it.

People come, people go. Death on the installment plan, death in dibs and dabs, death in aging pop stars and memories of days gone by the boards. Sting on MTV, long ago and far away. Do they even show music videos on MTV now? What would Madonna have been without MTV? The illusion of reality is the greatest illusion of all. I’m sure I’ve been here before, in another life, another body. I bought this ticket, and I’ll take the ride to the end of the line. Maybe it will end in a small village high on a mountain, with a stream in the valley below where a man can fish for trout. Smell of pine and wood smoke. The locals keep to themselves. The train clatters down the mountain, disappears beneath the trees. Or maybe the train runs out of track on a wide, flat desert, plows into the sand, stops dead. The end of nowhere; cactus and buzzards and the malevolent sun.

Sting plays on. I can’t even hear the crowd. Darkness is falling, slowly, like a dream.