Harrison Bickham > Recent Status Updates

"Good man. Remember this: Though the way is hard, the hag is the way. Our cause is just (just one damn thing after another) and God's on our side. Or vice versa. We're up against a mad machin Seldom, which mangles mountains and devours men. Somebody ha to try and stop it. That's us. Especially you."

Now the stillness was complete. The watchers on the rim, heard the croon of a mourning dove.They heard the hoot of an owl, the cries of little binds retiring to sleep. The great golden light of the setting sun streamed across the sky, glowing upon the mountains. Almost all the country within their view was roadies. uninhabited, a wilderness. They meant to keep it that way. They sare meant to try. Keep it like it was.

“The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life,” the doctor said. “Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness.” He sipped at his bourbon and ice. “Soon there will be no place to go. Then the madness becomes universal.” Another thought. “And the universe goes mad.”

Following the sparks upward they saw the stars turning on in staggered sequence-emeralds, sapphires, rubies, diamonds and opals scattered about the sky in a puzzling, random distribution. Far beyond those galloping galaxies, or perhaps all too present to be seen, lurked God. The gaseous vertebrate.

Do you realize what the land developers are doing to what's left of our open spaces? Do you know that Albuquerque-Santa Fe-Taos will soon become one big strip aty The same for Tucson-Phoenix? Seattle to Portland? San Diego to Santa Barbara? Miami to Saint Augustine? Baltimore to Boston? Fort Worth to-"
"They're way ahead of you,"

The bladder aches. The highway is silent and deserted. Maybe the world has already ended. Time to tap a kidney, release that bever-age. Hayduke unzips and sends a four-hundred-foot arc of filtered Schlitz pouring down through space to the master stream below. No sacrilege—only a quiet jubilation. Bats flicker in the shadows of the canyon. A great blue heron flaps upriver. You're among friends now, George.

If you don't drink, don't drive. If you drink, drive like hell. Why? Because freedom, not safety, is the highest good. Because the public roads should be wide open to all—children on tricycles, little old ladies in Eisenhower Plymouths, homicidal lesbians driving forty-ton Mack tractor-trailers. Let us have no favorites, no licenses, no goddamn rules for the road. Let every freeway be a free-for-all.

Alex closed his eyes and listened: a storefront gate sliding down. A dog barking hoarsely. The lowing of trucks over bridges. The velvety night in his ears. And the hum, always that hum, which maybe wasn't an echo after all, but the sound of time passing.

And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Wood-stock.

Now he turned to her, grinning. Her hair and face were aflame with orange light.
"See," Sasha muttered, eyeing the sun. "It's mine."

Fist my bump

“Whose nonexistence is necessary for the conception of this place? And how uncontrollable is the rage whenever this nonexistence is violated?”

Of course, it won't be the same as the one we've got now, but it’ll be better than nothing. Ah, what a shame they don't make Los Suicidas mezcal anymore, what a shame that time passes, don't you think? what a shame that we die, and get old, and everything good goes galloping away from us.

I started to think about the abyss that separates the poet from the reader and the next thing I knew I was deeply depressed

In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats

And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.

When I looked at the painting I felt the same convergence on a single point: a sunstruck instant that existed now and forever. Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature —fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place.