Unleash the Lach: Escape from L.A. & Leeway to an Alternative Universe

By Spinnaker Weddington

Unleash The Lach is the fi rst novel in a saga
series revolving around the mystique of the Lach
Ness monster; a Los Angeles family takes fl ight toScotland, unable to put up with another day in L.A.The mother has had it and if you tire of her chronicsocietal vengeance, please turn to the adventuresabout the Lach, a subterranean dominatrixprotecting her underground culture's food source,two neighboring tribes inhabiting sustainable,eclectic and ritualistically innovative cave dwellings,Mr. Kelivery and his plan to save the people, and thescores of other characters and encounters baring in
on them amidst the lush green highlands. This is a
highly philosophical and psychological engagement.
If any of it is too much on you, skip to the good
part. It's really about the writing. Yet clearly that
all the characters are sometimes too stuck in their
own minds to truly let go and enjoy the adventure

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483600703

Book preview

Copyright © 2013 by Spinnaker Weddington.

Also coming soon—The Afterlach and The Trinity of Lach Conversion

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4836-0069-7

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4836-0070-3

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The title UNLEASH THE LACH is reserved for all purposes of alternative

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Any ideas, concepts, personalities, opinions, seeming facts or perspectives presented here are in no way necessarily representation of the author’s or publisher’s beliefs or are even necessarily true. This is a fiction and all rights to such definition will be wholly maintained and respected. Opinions represent the protagonists, not the writer; If any of the situations seem similar to real world events, such is only an inference of hypothetical knowledge and/or fictitious suspicion. If these things were true, what should be done about them? Please treat accordingly. Opinions as such are represents of fictional characters and not necessarily the author’s or publisher’s understandings nor intentions.

Rev. date: 03/16/2013

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Contents

Introduction

ESCAPE FROM L.A.

Book 1

of

UNLEASH THE LACH

THE SECOND HALF

Practically Blue-Bloods

Getting It

Hidden Agendas

Restless Nights

Halfing It

Litany of Victims

The Family Dissects

Plan To A New Beginning

So It Seems

In Flight

Landing In The Old World

Locational Chameleons

Culture Shocks

Flashbacks To Life in Shangri-L.A.

Utopian Escape

Lach At First Sight

Psychological Destiny

Down To Business

The Wisdom of the Elder

A Prism of a Chronic Compulsion

The Aftermath of Secrets

Reporting To Kelivery’s Cave

The Family Castle

A Day Later

Immediate Out

Seriously?

How Monsters Are Made

Public Relations Protocol

LEEWAY TO AN

ALTERNATIVE UNIVERSE

The Film Set

Framing The Time Slot

Lach Slaching

Blood Guilt In The Craft

The Degeneration of the Masters

Innes Matures

Suspicion of The Professionals

Temporal Alleviations

After Encounter Reflection

Family Reliance

Back At The Castle

Ann Is Consumed

Lured Away

Tainted Flesh

Life Above

And Innes Too

Alienation Overrides

Transport Through A Cave System

Time Between

The Neighboring Cave Complex

Time Heals

Flashbacks Despite

An Innocent Delusion

Reality Changes Faster Than Rhyme

The Death Toll Rises

The Tribe Has Names

Other Histories Too

The Voyeurs Heal

The Crew Works Out

Prey Play

Dedicated to some of those who carry on with the dignity of life, thinking, feeling and being on the move despite. And of course the freedom of expression we hold so dear. And sympathy to those snagged in a difficult situation, chronic rant or chronic repulsion like the protagonist due to such practices represented if such be true. And to escaping from whatever it is. And to the one I love.

UNLEASH THE LACH

The First in a Saga Series by Spinnaker Weddington

Introduction

Unleash The Lach is the first novel in a saga series revolving around the mystique of the Lach Ness monster; a Los Angeles family takes flight to Scotland, unable to put up with another day in L.A. The mother has had it and if you tire of her chronic societal vengeance, please turn to the adventures about the Lach, a subterranean dominatrix protecting her underground culture’s food source, two neighboring tribes inhabiting sustainable, eclectic and ritualistically innovative cave dwellings, Mr. Kelivery and his plan to save the people, and the scores of other characters and encounters baring in on them amidst the lush green highlands. This is a highly philosophical and psychological engagement. If any of it is too much on you, skip to the good part. It’s really about the writing. Yet clearly that all the characters are sometimes too stuck in their own minds to truly let go and enjoy the adventure.

ESCAPE FROM L.A.

Book 1

of

UNLEASH THE LACH

a first in a series

of narrative creation

THE SECOND HALF

The second half of their lives started that day. In fact it was the exact mid-point of one of the McBurr’s actual life in days and hours and minutes. It was a day similar to all days that are ‘different’ in Greater Los Angeles. The clouds were too heavy. The sun was too strong. Its orange light pierced intensely through a fluffy hovering of a grey bellied rainstorm: a brazen cast of an intense spectacle against the mellow cool people thought they’d become by moving to the shore lined and palm breezed city. Beyond the metaphysical surprises, human catastrophes abounded—a fatal accident on the freeway—caused by a drive-by shooting and movie stars getting divorced. Everywhere were general red flags that the perfect shangri-la deep histories of families had migrated to for so to live the good life (from places where everything else had been okay but the weather), was not the lifestyle selected images had cracked it up to be. They had had lives elsewhere. The birthdays had been celebrated. The victories had been sung. The losses had been bemoaned. All in places where no one expects the sun to shine and warm and balm all day, all year. Places where perhaps one less person had been incidentally discovered at a coffee shop and catapulted to be a star of mythical proportions.

Everyone who comes to L.A. gravitates towards the same weather, the same prices, the same street names, the same fame and fortune. But in the long run, behind the folds of a common goal, individuation lulled beneath the gentrified ideal of fulfillment. And differences brewed beneath the complicit life styles. The greater mysteries and secrets begin their grafting code of the cosmos. Individuation is a rule-not a choice: it is an unavoidable absolute as specialization of beehives and wolves’ dens. No herd of people from such vastly different origins could possibly intermingle comfortably and naturally without insurrecting the major primeval powers of earth’s first creation to their favor—which unto modern man have no determined ‘names’ and so simply-’secrets’ . . . lurking in the background but determining everything. L.A. just gets too much attention and is too well known of a place to truly be the ‘sacred final destination’ it implies. Sacredness usually rides tandem with something hidden, private, not the latest gossip flopping off everyone’s tongue.

There is so much behind the curtain’s visibility: it falls apart; it changes; and who and what actually defines it in the long run remains to be determined. Despite that it is supposed to be the bosom of Hollywood, the entertainment capital of the world,: where the rich and powerful come to play and live—where the winners win some more-where the losers continue to do so and eventually slink away in shame: there is always something silent and unknown beneath—looming, unexposed… slightly sinister perhaps only because it is a secret and may continue to be one—even if benign; even if sweet—just by its categorization-secret. Behind all the diversity and immigrants, there are those who consider themselves the real Angelenos—who loved the city to death at one time in their lives and will stay till their deaths to return it to the same mystique and tempo they had once fallen for years ago or been under the lulling hypnosis of in falling in love or simply living the good life there as well. They cling to what they knew of their spirits when they were younger and untrammelled by the insatiate turmoils of life, like an old teddy bear to clutch while sleeping, waking, being sent off to dreamland.

L.A., and its swaying palm trees, enveloping oceans, party spots and sloping hills: tract homes and purported landmarks, didn’t seem like a place one had to earn their right to enjoy. It seemed a given—in its beaming sunshine and temperate weather; in its being the only place they’d ever called home to those born there and living there from cradle to grave: its movie stars once lived the life—its generators seemed to prosper: there was a time a movie and Made In Hollywood were practically equivalents; and appearing to the next generation, it looked like the kind of place people could be happy forever. When people are happy and fulfilled, they don’t think much about things changing; about the comfort being torn out from under their feet. But treasures create wars and what’s given isn’t always earned. Different parties and factions entertain the jewels to carrions of a barbaric feast. Many government entities were growing more and more corrupt, difficult, and so knee deep in a perspective no one else could fathom nor even function in respects to—indulging themselves while subjecting all others-the natives, the multigenerations-to whatever financial trick they could muster: parking tickets and other mild infractions were being used to disposses people of their freedom, their rights, their money: the taxpayers’ dollars weren’t enough—now they needed more from them and shamelessly they configured tricky and cruel ways to get it. They had set up unsustainable systems for their own good, their retirements, irrespective to any changes in the economy, irrespective to any demands for imperative services, even those incidental to an absolute emergency. People paid to manage economies had set up a system only for themselves nobody in their right mind could comprehend, while naming themselves public servants.

First they needed to take the peoples’ sanity-(an externality to their practices which only increased their power)—that stalwart inner sanctuary of oneself—locked in one’s name—, centered and focused: they did what they could to wrest it from what peoples’ names and states they needed for their own connection amongst each other: what arrangement of letters they needed as another bonding tract amongst each other instead of its true purpose as a last name endowed with all the dignities a covenant with God could comport to its meaning. They needed to mesh it and snare it of its purpose to such people and use it as an unnamed energy amongst each other—a fluid directive they could entitle themselves through the hypnosis of. They went after any substrate of power they could take. They needed it for themselves. The people who had paid the taxes and done the work were being denied their benefits while some people were pouring in to live off the social security over generously provided for their children born here… . Some had made their race a special needs disability… a race? . . . crafted soon enough as simply a social welfare means. There was no way of keeping correct statistics in Los Angeles because half the people were undocumented. So services and funds were being provided for six million instead of twelve million. The numbers reported had no validity. It was death for any statistician and when the projects were chartered in on reported numbers, the requirements were far more than that so the adequate services were never provided. They tried to make up for it to pay themselves those retirements with outlandish fees and penalties. There was no integrity and no one sought to fix it, and those who did were ostracized by whatever people liked to falsify their self conceptions and consider themselves nice and fair to anyone and everyone. Those in majority were still claiming and using a minority standing from the past for their trump, barbarizing such of its integritous purpose if ever there had been. Social security was no longer the retirement policy and insurance for working age adults whose working capacity had been jeopardized by one problem or another—often violations a negligent government enabled. Some public government entities were not even paying into it: with their secure positions—undertaking no reciprocity with the people in a united social retirement system—to help support it for it to survive, to show some concern in return to the people whose taxes were providing their exhaustive retirements that could bankrupt the whole country.

So some were replicating like mad with a convincing impetus to do so while many who lived in the vasts of America for years were even afraid to have children in fear they couldn’t afford to support them: there was nothing promised to them by which they had given to what they could. They weren’t getting money for each child they had: it never occurred to them that anybody would. They had no clue their tax dollars were being used to support other people’s children, undocumented immigrants who hadn’t paid into the system nor yet been destroyed by the hypocrisies of America. With no paperwork on them, they were set free from what everyone else had to deal with. The government administrations allowing such, organizing such—didn’t care: they were the ones who had their own retirement systems, irrespective to social security and so they didn’t care how they spent other peoples’ retirement promise they had paid so heavily into. It was a depraved sabotage afflicted by various government administrations upon its citizens: unclear as to why. It wasn’t that the citizens weren’t giving nor caring people, but they did not have enough for themselves anymore and were standing idly by while the support systems were being drained: they could not even have their own children due to finances, time, and support while they were paying for undocumented immigrants to do so rampantly. They cut new hirees income before retirements. And the retirees were only collecting their retirements and often continuing to work elsewhere, often aiming at a second retirement package from another government agency. It was a game to them to add up various government retirement schemata, and once they were the ones in that type of position, they railed through to access as many like over entitlements as possible.

Veterans were facing a second war at home, having to fight for the paltry and limited benefits in compare to those usurped by domestic and daily ‘government procedures’ of minimal life risk and considerable comfort. Instead social welfare assistance was being given to those here by illegal strategies. Numbers in the multitudes retained retirement benefits for civilian practices in a hundred thousand dollar plus range while the generosities in such respects for military were in less than quarter of numeric value. And if somebody said something about it or even noticed they were made to feel bad by those high paid government liberals who were paid enough not to care about what was taken from them to give to those who had come here in dependency of a system whose allegiances should have been elsewhere first.

They, those government entities, had so over entitled themselves they could find no foothold in relating to those without same. They confused this space usurped for themselves, in its long term security, entitlement, retirement and a host of other perks, for being divined by God, as what else could define such providance and security, unconditional love, and wrested sense of blessing to such accord? Some had hundred percent retirements, some of whom did not have to pay anything into it in the first place, while as well calling social security a windfall as if to lie to themselves to hide their shame from considering themselves public servants while not supporting the country’s system in such respects and didn’t need the social security the rest of America was paying twelve percent of their income into a year in securement of what had become a possibility so at risk. Twelve percent of income for what some people end up with less than ten percent of in retirement—called a windfall by those oftimes paying themselves a hundred percent plus overtime plus vacation of their best years they go to grotesque measures to amp up. They were so out of touch with plain subsistence life maintenance costs by actually having too much for themselves that they could not even connect to a person who did not have the same. The county was taking the tax dollars of the cities and usurping municipal value again—to their retirements, regardless if the cities they took from had retirements at half with significant contribution themselves.

At some offices, The County was employing more people from other counties than their own; brazenly showing off a lack of concern for the employment benefit of those who were paying property taxes and who needed their jobs for themselves. They never wondered about how the hell they were going to sustain it and when it came time to have to make changes, they slashed through public services and contract employees instead of revising an impossible set up they had devised years ago. In fact they were giving themselves ample raises and getting rid of anyone who questioned their practices. The pot holes and unmaintained streets were killing cars and people. That’s what they defined county management to be. They blocked out brain parts in such state condemning them to ‘danger’ and sanctified their states of mind with a trump in subjugation of such unblessed souls as themselves by such indulgence could define the neuro diametric through medicine to their favor. Medicine through law’s usurpation was a war on the people: psychiatry. It made them look so nice to people who didn’t know the whole story. It made no sense; the hypnosis was providing another people to multiply while practically spading those paying for it. If this be not hell what is?

And worst of all Megan came from those circles where the people had never had to rely on the social services sector. So when she said anything about it, she was regarded as somebody who had turned into a maniac. If you questioned anybody’s immigration you were regarded as some sort of fascist—a meanie who had been contumed by some weird vengeance. Any questioning of their practices was understood by them to be like a crime. To worry about social security in its support of children of undocumented immigrants despite that there be no real disability was some concert of being evil. There was no engagement of civil discussion and respectful interaction. They poured into the streets blocking roads, regardless of who had to get home to their children to make dinner. They used graffiti to make it look like rights to war and property take overs. They displayed such incomprehension of other peoples’ viewpoints as to display the true fascism, in liberal disguise—the most evil in distortion of a canon of thinking as well. They so showed off their own spoil as to make their own beliefs through such actions more an expression of insanity than any validity aside, shaming those in any equivalency of thought without their wrongful actions too.

They were so busy working and trying to prepare for a future; there was no way of knowing what was going on in any world beyond their own. It was a silent, sinister and invisible take over—the local governments supported, created and encouraged. It was fast becoming hell for its victims and heaven for its perpetrators. A lady could come here from certain other countries pop out a set of twins and have more money provided for her by public benefit systems to take care of her children than someone whose job skills were no longer needed but had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes when they were. Suddenly they awoke from the day to day activities, working far beyond their comfort zone, to create a financial means precisely so they could have children to realizing their time and energy had been exhausted and spent trying to create a lifestyle in which to do so only to recognize that it still wasn’t enough and their personalities were too entrenched in their work and whatever else they had gone through in America to feel capable of having children anyway. Anyone who thought about it went insane and was never heard from again. When those who know of certain practices are shock struck due to and hiding in their shame of merely feeling anger regarding… it is over. You’re considered some sort of fascist to try and protect rights for yourself. Life is a covert affair of regret and confusion brewing in strangulated agony of disbelief how anything so unfair could happen at all.

As mentioned, It was the second half of their lives: at thirty nine and forty six, the McBurrs really should have retained their own last names upon marriage: they never saw things truly as one; and they cohabitated rather than coloved (as a husband and wife should do) while ironically the only people being truly emotionally fulfilled by their marriage were their respective parents. None of their own more complex psychological needs were being satisfied at all. The two sets of in laws were the people who had found their souls’ reflection in the mirror-who the marriage really was for:—the parents, not the true parties involved. They got along like a club had been created just by them sitting together. Their conversations trailed far into the nights. Perhaps Megan and Sean connected because they were both fulfilling the same dream for others—which was that of doing it for their parents: mutts from Scotland, Ireland and even Great Britain—their family line—once the renegades and reckless explorers from the Northern Islands, the ones who had drank too much and believed too deeply in an ideal called freedom, or a religion created by fresh believers instead of rotting addicts and hypnoids unaware of what their original motive from the past even was,—and had then landed upon the shores of a country bustling with change though soon longing for steadfast security to harbor what ultimately was craved by their great grandparents—peace, comfort, generational commitment to a place they could focus more on living than longing, more on loving than leaving.

Practically Blue-Bloods

And so their parents had set their roots around Los Angeles and stayed in the homes and grew the companies which ultimately made of both of them what looked like to others—‘rich people’, practically ‘blue-bloods,’: those people who seemed they had been there forever and made what is how it was and would always be. Images are often stronger than truths. Despite the sacrifices they had made, the commitments they bore and the long and endless hours spent on planning for the future instead of living for the present, once they had achieved those goals—they looked to others no different from people who had popped down from Mars with everything others coveted or lottery winners blessed with creature comforts as if it were their skin or whatever it is Wasps look like to people from other places, with different styles. Their houses were set back far from the street with majestic and green glowing lawns. At times they had gardeners—at times they didn’t. If they had the money they made sure it looked like they did too; if they didn’t—they used the time to better use and enjoy what they had bought when they had the money. They invariably wore what looked like recent fashion even if it had been designed and purchased during the olden days the modern stylized copies were so thence honoring.

But Megan and Sean weren’t the ones who had created that resigned comfort which really disguised the desperate relief that finally, one had found what one was looking for: they didn’t know the sacrifices their parents had made. They weren’t around when their parents had to work twelve hour days, take second jobs, or spend their weekends working the company books to design and procure better methods and results. They had arrived after the fact—once the lawn had grown in and the pool had been built. Of course they were born during the difficult years but had only been sources of laughter and belly-bezooms with play airplane whirring in their parents’ hands. They didn’t know wine wasn’t being ordered even on their anniversary to save for the down payment. By the time their memories locked in to anything beyond playing human airplane and Saturday morning cartoons, a calm tenor of success and achieved results proliferated from the closeted past.

Even as they aged, the two of them didn’t really know the secrets and struggles and stories which had made of three hundred years of migration, two couples who belonged to the local country clubs and somehow managed to save a considerable sum to retire with: the signs of struggle, sacrifice, and strategy were gone by the time Megan and Sean were old enough to detect the symbols. The stories they told were told with so much fondness for Chicago in the twenties and ocean liner crossings of the Atlantic, no pain of poverty and stress and risk were gleaned from what sounded like fire side memoirs.

That day was the second part of their lives because Megan had suddenly been asked to leave a position which she had ultimately only wanted to secure that ‘second’ half of her life for. And Sean was caught at home with someone almost half her age: in a home, they had initially shared the mortgage of but which month by month, Sean somehow seemed to pay less and less for while Megan paid more and more. Sean had become a functioning addict; there were few signs except for the money only because no one was watching. No one had time to notice because no one ever does unless they are being paid to do that and only that. Even if someone does notice—that something is strange; a distance is constantly felt which isn’t easily named nor even the proper response known for: whatever the cause is—it’s lockjaw in language and simply a habitual action. And she didn’t yet have it in her to address the money aspect that basically Sean was wasting the leeway of her labors on his own ‘physical and ungarnered’ impulses. It was easier for her and her nature to focus on her work. Work she was being paid to do—not a psychological battle at home with unknown and potentially devastating results. Megan knew to prefer the mental acrobatics manifesting as a lecture on . . . Behavior During Lunar Eclipses. What the true fire was under Sean’s bizarre antics Megan knew to avoid.

Somehow Megan had thought she would be spared from the new nightmare—the nightmare that had nothing to do with home: that those ‘layoffs’ and ‘job-losses’ and unexpected and difficult challenges which she read about in the newspaper everyday even though it seemed who controlled what caused such never read a single one of them; people paid to manage a county seemed to not even be reading the newspaper as they never even used such wisdom as some of those writing letters on their own time without being paid to do so in giving solutions extolled, or heard about offhandedly while eavesdropping or chatting with peoples’ whose names she forgot but faces she remembered: that didn’t happen to people who worked for state universities and that didn’t happen to people who had received coveted prizes for their academic research and lecture circuits and retirement plans that seemed to create a second childhood for adults—that they would be taken care of till they died with the same rewards and blessing of security, if not more, than those working were. That’s what they had been told. Megan had thought about that. That they were being paid more while they didn’t work than when they did; as if it were more valuable to the people for such people not to be working at all: as if they had done so much wrong in their professions, had been so wrong about so many specific and refined issues, had caused so much damage, suffering, pain, discomfort, inconvenience, wasted time and trauma in what work they did do to others that it only made sense to them to pay them more to not work. There was no other way to make sense of what disrespect they showed the working. The pension and retirement plans of even serial murderers and pedophile teachers were being protected by the administrative management of government institutions at the time: all shown off to the unemployment rate at over ten percent. It was the actual school administration protecting the pensions of their pedophile teachers; a very entity entrusted with concern for childrens’ well-being. This was being done at a time they claimed they did not have adequate funds for schoolbooks and other basic necessities. If this be not reason for war, what is?

That’s what Megan wanted past point B though, to join them as best she could, to get some of that security and protection and entitlement the governments provided their people with. Things had happened to her in her life which made her need that kind of protection and security; she felt she deserved it and needed it and wanted to have another child knowing an employment security which could enable such. The economy is a scale and with what they had secured for themselves, it was almost impossible to live without doing same somehow. Besides, as a victim of so many government practices and negligences, she felt she truly deserved it. In fact she felt such positions should be saved for victims… the security regardless, the being so provided for till death, as if some essential aspect of themselves had been violated by the risk taking world out there and so in revenge they had created their own protectionary haven for themselves as what the government is. One would think that would be only for people transgressed by the government; in admittance of some gross, unforgivable, and irreversible error; not for those creating the transgressions. Once she realized whatever anything else was might not be what it appeared… that behind every simple success there were multiple failures; that those people who are successful usually had MBAs or law-degrees: something which put in as few letters as possible some justification for someone to be chosen over another. And it was never anything from the real world… challenges one had faced that were complex. Anything too complex—void: failure! Success was a controlled derivative of a fast food culture now branded as degrees—which meant = smart = right = dollars, even if all that was truly being practiced was idiotic waste. That in the world beyond, the promises were not so obvious, comprehensive and exclusive. You had to go after whatever it was you got—obsessively, diligently, almost compulsively: nothing was handed to you. You had to go get it.

Getting It

Then one day she got it. By the time she got it she was so wrapped up in other things, she felt it was plain luck she had checked her email that day: Like many good things that happen to some people, especially those who have already crossed the bridge into considerable difficulty and tribulation themselves, that twist of fate includes something bad happening to somebody else and sometimes same but different for themselves. It may be true only a quarter of the time but life in its cycles and statistics simply becomes something which is a formula modeled by ins and outs not always determined by unicorns prancing welcomingly upon red carpets. Someone who had been in the department of anthropology for thirty years and had preferred to continue working even at retirement age had suddenly died. It had seemed like that position would never open up regardless of who had discovered what. He had so enjoyed his job he never thought to give anyone else a chance at same. He was clearly a danger to all who coveted his position—as he hung onto it and remained in it even when his voice could barely be heard by the students lining the classroom walls. Happiness creates a complacency which rarely includes anyone else’s needs. In fact that is so often what it is—a state wherein which what happens appertains to the balance and well-being of the happy regardless of who could be happier with what the happy had: what is acknowledged and assimilated is that which contributes identifiably to such happiness as the happy possesses. It was about six weeks after his retirement date… a slowly corrosive illness which had quickly upsurged and then done a deadly punch. Incidentally the professor had never changed from a teaching post and had not busied too much with the politics and administration of the school; had not shifted into management to give somebody new a chance, somebody else a dream-start. Then again why would anyone?

Most people just do not sacrifice their passions for others and anthropology tended to attract a certain emotionally intelligent type: often stubborn and proud about some deep-rooted function of their own culture they love enough to shape a profound connection to its study in all possible forms. And yet somehow just because they were anthropologically part of such culture, they feel they own it in some way regardless if they never really did a single thing to improve, maintain, nor extend such culture’s ways: they think that by hording the teaching positions of its course they have contributed to its maintenance in some way while in fact they are beating a dead horse over the head while enabling the rest of the world to fall apart.

Out of nowhere she went from hustling the buck daily: making this effort, that effort, resume here, research idea there: not knowing what should come first and what second; always in a whirl—to: an interview: then an acceptance: then she started—a semester: six months of a syllabus, a system, a known thing she could repeat and repeat till she retired and get paid more and more for each year: a course! She could actually believe at that point that she may be liberated from purely hustling it day in and day out: and then get to settle down somewhat-actually experience life rather than be in desperate effort for some sign of it—be the one to deal with Innes’ schooling and activities: and ideally, even have another child or even two or three. A steady secure job might just give her the peace of mind to do so. It was not only a new job—it could mean the means to bring a new person into the world as well. It would mean something to preoccupy her twenty four seven from all the pain and misery she had experienced before Dasher Prancer and Vixen had set their feet down on planet earth. A solid mature relief dove-tailed the pleasure she experienced in finally getting to do something she had had true interest in and not solely for a pay-check, and a good one at that. The security was as important to her as being able to focus on a subject matter she had cultivated a relation to at an earlier point in her life—life before bills, financial stress, before facets of the government and law began toying with every iota of her existence, and the layers of experience which invariably create depositories of huge unspoken thoughts and personality traits. Bizarre predilections to opinion and belief cultivate in those who felt they have tried too hard and gotten too little in return.

Frustruation is the key to religious fanaticism and religion is the key to eternal life… so people are precluded to believe while in essence a real God’s requirements are so much purer than that and may involve some insight and understandings few make the effort to intone, clear, and move forward through: so someone having a bad time at cause of someone else can damn their perpetrator to such loss and not have other chances to resurrect same. That people could be made to be so miserable deep in amidst a culture which looks like everything one needs is there: more than enough food, exceptionally nice cars, people everywhere should somebody need a date or some companionship or affection, books bloating out of the gills and activities and hobbies one could never complete in a lifetime no matter how long they lived: it looked like everything was there and everything was fine, but behind the scenes, those handling the semantics which effected everybody seemed to be handling them terribly terribly wrong: as if their every footstep and capacity to chew relied upon whatever degenerative humiliation and despair they were afflicting upon the people relying upon them: as if every terrible thing they did to others which tricked them out of so many of the basic mental, emotional, and living orientation conditions of life was something their own spirits, egos, personalities and impulses thrived on. As if their very body functions were dependent upon the abuses they subjected their ‘constituents’ to.

It could make anybody metaphysically paranoid and at bottom culturally paranoid too—as if that type of people and their burial practices needed XYZ to happen to so and so and those people over there—they’re occupying those other peoples’ spaces where their children would otherwise be: what is meant should be transparent,—those expecting to be taken care of till they die like children of a fascist emperor garnering all the peoples’ taxes for his children alone; they take up the space of nonconditional love an individual would otherwize have for their child. Their egos blossom under the mere inference; they are addicted to it like others are to their vices and their intoxications. It must be very intoxicating to think one deserves to be taken care of by others’ tax dollars till they die at premium rates regardless of what they do. Not even as compensation for a crime imposed upon them? Not even something they had to create anew? For really not even doing anything most others couldn’t do as well? For no risk, for no work, for no service-as if that’s all their capable of.

Finally, success!—simplicity, ease-getting to focus on results rather than maintenal means-finally: being taken care of by something larger, more secure, more long standing than herself: a state university professorship with benefits and one blessing after another explaining to her constantly that her well-being and security and comfort were taken care of for her! 401ks! Retirement Plans! Unions to fight for you even for the law for teachers who should have had the skills to negotiate for themselves! She couldn’t believe it at first. She had always been so jealous of those people—those people who had those jobs: jobs they got in their twenties they could stick with till their sixties and invariably make more and more and more money and get more and more and more standing, prestige and money as each year went by: regardless—regardless of everything-regardless of what she did or what she didn’t do: what she said or what she didn’t say. Regardless of the economy even—they’d raise the tuition prior questioning retirements. She could orgasm alone touching nothing just thinking about it sometimes. Taken care of till death! Paid more for work she didn’t do as work she did! Heaven! She had seen how hard her father worked—home late: his desk piled with paper—despite how rich they may have looked. Risk saturated every phase of existence; in contrast the practices of the county government represented so much sociopathic function, it became impossible to trust least feel right in trusting. Behind the billowing palm trees and circular drive, he seemed to be working all the time. There never seemed to be a true friendship of the family. It was always a business associate or a potential client. The country club membership did not seem to be for their family to sit around and play tennis and toast each others graduations. The membership seemed to be for her father to ‘entertain’ customers, associates, or potential investors. He had always advised her to get a long term secure position with some connection to the government to have a strong retirement and weekends to enjoy. She didn’t know how, being that he didn’t, he knew of what an advantage and comfort this could be. In her late thirties, she became blessed with his advice.

In fact, often Megan thought her father was lying and just didn’t trust that she could succeed in the world of business—like he had—that she were too hypnotized by results instead of procedures: that perhaps his company wasn’t succesful or pertinent enough to survive another generation., that he didn’t trust her enough to run what he had created. She couldn’t imagine why he didn’t want her to simply take over the family business but perhaps he truly believed the secrets and methods of how he ran his business were too deeply ingrained with the traits he had learned from ‘hard-knocks’ and fear regardless of how he had polished the appearance to others. Megan never considered that her mothers’ ‘stints’ with completing her college degree and dabbling in classes towards a masters degree were actually elegant ‘ifs’ should the family business fail and she should need to work as something other than her father’s office manager. She thought her mother worked for her father because they liked being together and it was romantic—not because they were saving money and it was a way they could share one car to get to work, back then—at the beginning. They made everything look effortless to their children. Perhaps they were simply charmed with stepping-stones which formulate that truth.

It had only been six years that she had had the ‘blessing;’ ‘the blessing’ fed by tax dollars and the time of many all tailored to one… a job with inevitable advancement: a secured raise every two years; the risks of six million, the general population of Los Angeles, paying the life long security of two hundred thousand (state and county and city governments)was how her new Los Angeles functioned. Least to say the federal back up of three hundred plus million people plus all their forefathers and foremothers inventions and risks too. At one time it was a rich government from years of movies and music entertaining the world spiralling down to the treasure troves of one main city—Hollywood of Greater Los Angeles. The movie stars ended up on drugs and dying in mental wards after their brief heydays which were over practically as fast as the money was spent: while the government workers had retirements and grandchildren and second homes. Because they were promised a life time of security, not an amount for a single shot at stardom and then nothing else: the image tinsel town had created for the world was fastly insidiating local politics, making a place which looked made of money disempower the benefit of that made of work. She had made a decision to be stable, secure a better future for herself and her family, be part of the coveted covenant. She wanted to be one of those people with guarenteed vacations who didn’t have to take her work home: who did not have to worry about next year while still trying to get through this one. She wanted to be one of those people who didn’t have to take risks and make investments for ideals for when she was older; often uncomfortable, often dumb, often snared in the manacles of the rest of humanity promised nothing too.

As the film industry fleshed out beyond, the government didn’t change their strap on the taxes paid and the good times. Money flowed because movies were being made. People had to spend to look like the movie stars they were and if you didn’t look succesful, you weren’t succesful. So the money went around; it wasn’t being stored for when they were older in the county vaults. They weren’t provided with incomes for life and free education and training: their auditions weren’t paid for by tax dollars for every mile they drove to get there. Risk was all they knew. Analysis hadn’t yet crafted the shabby/chique uncertainty of being something other than what one appeared to be. And there was no need to be so complex as to ‘not need’ to project an image. Entities with six different agencies within whose only work was to protect a skilled government laborer’s paycheck and promising and securing one’s retirement. Whole jobs paying people just to pay people. People whose whole work was one single work which was to ensure people were paid. Before she had always had to do this herself. Before she had always had to make something happen in order to get anything from it. Now she could focus on her intellectual craft while others took care of this work negotiating and protecting her. She felt like she was getting more ‘love’ from the multiple agencies paid to ‘protect her’—the teachers’ unions, and retirement managers, and 401ks and covered weekend seminars and university employee this and that—than her own parents as a child! Her mind blossommed. Without fear of the following day, she was able to really pursue the craft she had chose for that day, not the time consumptions she was forced into by such being in denial.

She didn’t have to do anything but teach her subject—like a demigod protected from all the ramshackle random moves one has to make to survive without all this ‘specialness!’ She had a union for her raises and a benefits official for her 401K management, retirement package, insurance: she was cared for—she felt these people cared more about her happiness and comfort during her retirement than what she was teaching or why she was getting all such in the first place. She felt loved, like a partner in crime: special, on a spree, escaping the horror of having to take care of oneself with nothing promised. It was like she was married to a succesful husband hiding as a human resource agency who took care of all her needs even though her own husband seemed to be a schlepping shlub doing who knows what from day to day. Her real husband was the university supported by the tax dollars. He was the great provider… the university: employing so many people just to make sure her retirement were right. She never felt so indulged in her life. She never felt so loved in her life. She never felt so important in her life. She never felt America to be so great to enable these people with whole jobs just to ensure her retirement was comfortable. She had even read somewhere that these agencies understood their retirements as the capacity to maintain their lifestyles even above that of when they were working—as if that were the taxpayers’ job—to maintain the lifestyles of the government workers even at retirement regardless of what it took from the people they purportedly served. She could not believe she had ever read this—that people could think such a way: just being part of it felt like the high of a crime spree lasting years and years and years. Her brain was in orgasmic flight from just a taste of the anxiety, worry, agony, pain, and trauma lifted from her shoulders like a bird in flight: Atlas abandoned, Icarus avenged.

But during that time she savored every hour of it: every hour of the security; every hour of the ‘comfort.’: she lost weight from feeling so much stress slide off her back: they bought a house; they went out to dinner;they joined wine clubs and upgraded their landscaping: they spent money on living instead of trying to secure the next source of money, instead of doing whatever they could to procure a future. No matter how wealthy her parents were they had not procured their wealth through Megan and once she was an adult—she had to make it on her own. They spent weekend time going places instead of researching another job, filling out applications and working. They got to go places and do things—not research and try. As soon as she entered the university walls she could feel the complacency and mental relief, like babies blowzing through a lullaby in a cherishing and practically religious autonomy: she had never felt such peace and somnolence, like a holy grail sliding through the atmosphere making people feel like all peace ever existed for was their peace of mind and adulation of their cognitive processes—with students crowding into their classrooms and marching outside with signs when they could not be part of the trance of the educational ego.

Priorly, she had been one of life’s casualties: in a constant and chronic state of hustling her next contract position, her next book, her next career: constant change and a constant underlying tone of question. Life was a state of maturely crafted calm and skillfully handled stress, not rewarded entitlement. Experience was a matter of fast changes and unexpected challenges, not years at the same location doing the same thing with a different pay scale—without even questioning one’s own directive. How am I going to make ends meet six months from now? A year from now? She had to plan six months, five years, twenty years, down the line. Time was never her own but an arrangement for a future when she could not work so hard, take so many risks; she was getting older and wanted in part to be taken care of herself and she remembered her father’s words and realized a secure job with the state—a state university position—was one of few ways of doing so. She had to blank the fact that she had worked on getting so twenty some years prior only to be totally rejected and in her opinion: totally wrongfully so. It had ruined her life—she wasn’t an idiot who would go for something she didn’t really need. As wrong as those denial of her needs were—sometimes when she made efforts she got something for it; sometimes she didn’t. But she had already been ruined and humiliated into going for things she didn’t really want in the first place. But the work to get the work, even if it was fourth, fifth, sixth choice—was often harder than the work itself. Sean became a high functioning addict and Megan became a workaholic. At times Megan wished she had somehow never tried anything and just got to space out all day doing nothing rather than realizing all her efforts had only put her life in more serious jeopardy of loss.

They spent money taking risks to procure for their future which wasn’t always wize and somehow often put them under water. They had to take their own risks; nothing was promised to them. It seemed their parents had exhausted all the self created security and comfort which could possibly exist. She never recollected in her childhood home the tense pitch and disconcerting intensity which seemed to perpetrate all the nooks and crannies of her and Sean’s life—all of course, before her ‘government funded job:’ the student’s tuition only accounted for thirty three percent of the university’s operating costs. The rest was through various taxes. Megan loved it—the feeling that she was cared for and provided for until she died—like a baby in somebody’s sweet arms rocking her to sleep every night with the happiness of feeling so sacred and taken care of—like a king, a baby, a deity with an alter to have all these specially designed packages for her! Deep in though she occassionally wondered had she gone to graduate school twenty years prior when she wanted to, she assumed she would have married a different kind of man: who may have at least been able to provide her with his cut on security and promise should for some reason her own be jeopardized or hexed in anyway.

Ironically, other people scoffed at the anxiety their personalities, aggressive and focussed, seemed to refine. Megan thought about someone laughing at her financial anxiety and saying But your parents—in that big house: they’re rich. She resented the comment: her parents paid taxes, huge taxes, and were promised nothing by no one. Their wealth was something they had to constantly create, not something promised and handed to them simply for spending a certain amount of time with the same agency for years. It seemed like the current government was trying to ruin her financial capacity for her to provide for herself as a grown adult regardless and cornering her into even having to take more from her parents who were already one piece in the puzzle supporting them. Her father lived off a business it took money to run and wasn’t being paid because he had once run some money. Her father didn’t have a lifetime retirement provided by the government. He had to work more and more to maintain everything he had. She was a thirty nine year old woman who had a family of her own she needed to provide for. They had made their money with innovation and hard-work;invention and wize decisions and for someone to use it like an off-hand reaction at her was offensive and insulting. They didn’t have it coming regardless of how they spent it. They had done well with wize decisions and risks. They had done well because they had worked hard and worked together. They had done well because it was a different time and people got something for their money back then. People trusted eachother. People worked together. She didn’t realize her parents, though they worked hard, were nonetheless blessed… that their hard-work did pay off and not everybody’s does. That some people work hard and end up with nothing.

Now was different. Megan had entered a whole new world when she had gotten her professorship. Priorly she spent her weekends researching—combing the newspapers for new ways of making and saving money. Accessing uncomfortable and meazly government benefits for supplemental support she never really understood the peramaters of, clueless as to what was going on on the other side of those provided for by the government as if they were God’s gifts to the earth. She’d fill out ten pages of information with threats and potential fines listed and places she had to show up and lines she had to wait in. There was no respect; there was no concern. There was no show of understanding life and what people are like—because to them: all they needed to know was that what they did nobody needed to be done in that way: there was no benchmark—there was no attitude of serving, showing any respect to where the tax dollars which paid them were coming from. She’d be turned down for foodstamps from being twenty dollars over the income level; unemployment for being a thousand dollars shy of a benchmark set twenty times that; she had to use up her 401K, her bonds from childhood, pawn her emotional treasures. She’d get benefits for six months and then they would stop… with no explanation. She’d spend her days on the phone with creditors and bill collectors: trying to undo whatever mistakes the anxiety and frustruation of not knowing where next months rent was going to come from induced her into. No-she didn’t need that: why did she buy it? Distraction, fear, a moment of escape, a guilty pleasure of being an idiot but hurting nobody while so many other peoples’ idiocies had hurt her so much. She’d hear them talking some language besides English behind the desks of the government counters as if America had been taken over by another country and she didn’t even know until she walked into a government office. They’d draw up her whole past history of any govenrment intervention making her relive whatever it was that had trapped her in the nightmare in the first place. They would not let her heal. It had never felt like the keys to heaven being handed to her just because she had a job. She was treated with disdain and threat and rock bottom abuse by practically every general relief worker or social services employee she had ever had to deal with. It was a nightmare of sitting in a government waiting room for four hours with people who’s egos had been destroyed—who were trying to get just enough money to not lose their apartments—only to find out none for them: it had gone to support undocumented immigrants children born here whose risks were rewarded, not considered child endangerment in case such support wasn’t provided. Third generations were having their children taken away from them for what undocumented immigrants were being rewarded for. One race was being accused of child endangerment when their children showed up hungry for school; another race was being provided with three meals a day through the school system with no questions as to their parents’ roll in the matter.

While those from here were being used to operate the system they had paid their taxes to even further—the undocumented immigrants who had come to a place with no work were being granted government money for their children born here while those who had been born here from multiple generations of tax paying hard work were having their children taken from them for invalid reasons so the agency could have another ten thousand per head—baby count: and the foster providers could have another thousand a month. Foster kidnappers were paying their mortgages on their ‘won babies’ while the biological parents were going homeless. It was a nightmare there was no word for: it felt compulsively like the end of the world or one that should end due to how things were being done. God had provided everything—the tillable earth, the sustenance rain, the warming sun, the salt to cure wounds, water to hallow new and cleansed need-materials in the covenant of infinite if treated properly—but it seemed all people could do is ruin everything through the simplest means, the most basic principals.

In Los Angeles, for some reason, that human corrosion was more painful—it was hard to understand how people could be so cruel with what the sun gave, the waters showered, and images confessed of the possible. God had given everything—but it seemed people could not make a single decent decision in her favor—no matter how hard she tried nor how many letters she wrote to various bureaucracies.

Regardless of what fountain lay in the traces of her bottomless language, what word-smith God had made her to be through what muse—when none of her words meant anything nor did nothing for herself to the people she had to write them to, soon enough she grew to hate even her capacity to write: even her capacity to think: even her capacity to try: she might as well as wiped a shit on a piece of paper and sent it in with what disrespectful abuses she received in return from the controlling bureaucracies to her well crafted and well meaning word. They made her hate all of her skills and talents;she started to even fear showing the wrong people some of her discoveries accidentally—things she had worked so hard for to discover—transpiring through her like the ease of a snapshot to someone forcing her to divulge her information. With the way they had treated her, she wanted nothing good for them—especially easy access to her hard-earned knowledge.

Sometimes she hated her father for not simply helping with the financial difficulties. He felt he had paid enough taxes that the ‘system’ should have enough to assist his daughter and that any additional ciphoning could collapse his foundation. He wanted her to know the same pride in self created success that he had known. However he saw it, he just didn’t hone up to the true responses she expected—ever. She didn’t know how to explain to him: "It just isn’t that way anymore, dad. The world has changed. Face it, no matter what you spent on education, what efforts you