chase scenes serial #10
the development and structure of the trip. Not the geographic or chronologic track, or the geographic and chronological for in a travelogue they track one another. The structure of the head trip. Which happens to unfold in a more documented fashion when I am actually documenting. There are of course tangents that my mind takes during the day which will never be documented‡. I see that my father is suffering from phantom tick, he has gone to sleep yet he keeps reaching up to feel around his hairline. The little bastards. When we were stopped by a ranger on the last leg of our hike, which followed the main road for some four (4) miles, which we chose because the ticks were getting so bad, he said that they will choose a spot on a stick or blade of grass and hold on with two (2) of their legs. The other four (4) float free and when something brushes past them they just latch on with those four (4) free legs. He had watched them do it. The part that is hard for me to reconcile is that there must be millions of ticks just hanging there by their two (2) legs until they die. Unless they can eat bison shit, then they might be saved. If not, well, they must not be able to survive that long without blood. We wondered what good they were. What good is anything, any animal that is. Ticks are parasites. Are
‡ On each page that I visit I remember back through the trip. The way in which these footnotes compose information, and the type of content they require is very different from the running text above. The footnotes, as they do not flow, require compact, closed scenarios or cases. As I land upon each I attempt to run back through the trip with a sensitivity to small capsule narratives that I have not yet documented. I usually cannot think of one until I begin to write. These little compositions generally are born more of their, no, of the conditions under which they are written, such as now, in front of the Equitable Building in Atlanta. The protesters are still here. Their first day was last Thursday, the afternoon I left for the trip. I could not focus at work that day, the impending air travel spooking me a bit so I pulled together all my gear with the intention of leaving for the airport straight from lunch. I sat out in the sun for about one and a half hours (1.5 hours) reading Titus Groan and watching the protesters. They stand against a construction company who is fitting out an office in the tower. I must confess that they bring little sympathy out from me because they appear so singularly disinterested. Each day there seems to be a foreman of some sort who manages the group, he is well-dressed and often has a video camera. The rest of the group appear as if they might be working for their lunch. They are not only an unsavoury group, they seem to have little or no passion for the cause, many listening to Walkmans or only trying to hand out leaflets to women. One of them is the short man who sells pirated DVDs on MARTA out of his backpack which he wears on the front of his body, either for ease of sketchy access or because he has been stared down by a mighty bison on the sage flats of North Dakota.
