This evening, a pretty thing bathed in soft spring sunshine that complemented the emerald green of the fresh vegetation on the trees, I drove down a newly watered-down and refreshingly dust-free Georges Mill Road on my way to my home. To traverse Georges Mill to my house is to watch Short Hill Mountain, at whose foot I live, loom ever-larger in your windshield until the whole gorgeous Appalachian upheaving fills your windshield. When you think the road is about to climb straight up the steep side of that ridge, you've reached Jingo Acres.
As my truck made a sharp turn tonight, my eyes -- even in the best of circumstances unreliable, myopic things -- suddenly caught a large object hanging in the sky just over the ridge. Since I was piloting a pickup truck, I couldn't concentrate on it until I knew the road ahead was clear. Then I stopped the truck to squint at it.
It was a blimp. Creeping along the ridge, south to north.
I couldn't make out any glyphs on the side of it. No obvious Goodyear or Fuji logo on it.
Just...an unmarked blimp. Hovering, slowly gliding north, pressed to the west side of the ridge by the same thermal currents that the raptors use to coast on their seasonal migrations north and south. Pretty much right over my house. Seventy-five miles northwest from Washington, about the same distance southwest from Baltimore -- that is to say, far, far from city centers where an advertising blimp might pass unremarked.
Inevitably, Questions Arise.
Why was it there? Over my house? Where there had never been a blimp before? Why now, why today, why exactly at this moment as I approach my home?
On any other day I might have marveled at the aeronautical wonder of it all -- an enormous bag of gas piloted by some extremely lucky guy in, for all I know, a leather pilot's helmet with goggles and a long white airman's scarf, howling his joy into the Short Hill thermals.
But today, they're tapping the phones.
Today, I can't be goofy and jokey and Ha-Ha Pretend-Paranoid. You don't get to play like it's all some big joke anymore, Honcho. It's fuckin' real now, chum.
Facility is real.
This afternoon, in a fit of defiance at work, I picked up the phone and rang Joe Bageant's number. I was going to tell him that since they are tapping the lines, I wanted it on record -- on Official United States Government Eyes-Fuckin'-Only Record -- that when the news broke about the 10,000,000 phone calls, the first person I called was the single baddest, most dangerous Commie agitator on the East Coast of America. (I also wanted to tell him I'd found the gravesite of one of his ancestors in a Hillsboro cemetery, but hey...)
Joe didn't pick up.
Hmmm.
You with me, Pynchon kids?
Blimp-Limericks
A Zeppelin-pilot named Goya
Drove his blimp right into my foyer
He was sorry, he said
But the voice in his head
Told him Hush, better hire a lawyer.
A technocrat driving a blimp
Is bound to acknowledge a crimp
In his careful surveillance
Of your private e-mailings
If you catch him and make him your gimp.
A country that tolerates this
Breach of our Constitutional bliss
Should simply say "Fuck it"
And drink well-earned buckets
Of lukewarm, watered-down piss.
Ja-ja-ja-jaaa!
In Prussia they never eat pussy!
15 comments:
According to JB's blog, he's in Belize...
sings:
JB's in Belize, where the Feds can't find 'im.
JB's in Belize, where there's no one to mind 'im.
Is there a hunt going on?
Spies in for the kill?
Is that noise in the line?
Or just a humm in the breeze?
JB's in Belize
And is stayin' there still.
Aaaaannnd...
If you want my address,
It's that Or-i-ent Ex-press
On the Samjack of Novi-Pazzzaar!
Oh, God, someone help me please...
There was an ex-spook with a limp
Who worked in DC as a pimp.
When asked why he was fired,
He said, "No, I retired.
While spying, I fell from a blimp."
At an exhibit of paintings by Goya
Ned had to hide out in the foyer.
Though that rhyme's not exact,
He was a victim, in fact,
Of traumatic, post-blimp paranoia.
The zepplin's an air-ship, it's true,
Made once by the Germans to do
All their bombin' and flyin',
But it's used here for spyin'
On smartasses with blogs, just like you!
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!
There was a songwriter named Bob
Who, fed up with pulling his knob
Got a high-powered rifle
For merely a trifle
And a sunny little apartment on Pennsylvania fuckin' Avenue
Break out the Frank Zappa, that prophet of future-is-now America: "it's da blimp! The blimp!"
I get the best goddamned commenters in Left Blogsylvania, I'm tellin' ya. There may not be a lot of you, but you sure make up for it in quality.
hekmut, just for the sake of my anal-compulsivitivity, it's Captain Beefheart, not Zappa, and the line goes "It's the blimp, Frank, It's the blimp!" off the seminal Trout Mask Replica. I say the line as kind of an obsessive-compulsive talisman every time I see a blimp, and I haven't been hit by orgone death-rays yet (knock wood).
Ah, but Akatabi, to be fair to Helmut, "The Blimp" from "Trout Mask Replica" was recorded down the phone by Frank, who later supplied the backing track (DUH-duh-du-dut-dut-dunna-dunna-nuh!) from "Charles Ives," a track he was working on at the time for -- Christ, was it "Weasels Ripped My Flesh"? It's late, and I can't be bothered to dig it up... But "The Blimp" is at least half-Frank.
The other half is inawt.
Throw me in the gutter, I'll buy you a bottle of wine!
Help, I'm a rock.
The Army is probably starting round two of its surveilance blimp tests. During round one, they flew the thing over my house in Arlington - low - I could see the pilot's face - gave him the finger.
Here's the WaPo story about round one.
Thanks Neddie and apologies to Helmut. After that WaPo story, I could use a spodieodie.
H. Rumbold, Master Barber
Damn! That WaPo story means that there is indeed a mothership... the facility.
Its a curious state of affairs.
Despite the menacing airs,
I think that a chimp
may be up in that blimp
madly rearranging the chairs.
On the other hand, perhaps...
The craft was sent in to snoop
on the head of a rascally group:
A bastion of hate
that would threaten the State
with their talk of anthropomorph soup.
Bathed in the sunshine of spring,
the mission was in full swing
But returning too soon,
Neddie spied the balloon,
And foiled the Merciless Ming.
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