Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,13
flirting with each other. I thought the one girl was going to take her dress off.
Walking into the box-mall-church always feels the same. Like something really bad has happened and no one inside knows. I entered on the side by the Cineplex. A kid ran in front of me pretending to be a commando. He hid behind a fake tree and took cover from an imaginary bomb blast. His parents were holding his ice cream and laughing while he ducked and dived through the indoor jungle. Chocolate ice cream trickled down in between his mother’s fingers and she licked the back of her hand.
“Have you signed up for our raffle?”
It was a girl with lip gloss. I could smell the alcohol in her perfume. She turned and pointed to a shiny red truck about forty yards away. Big as a tank, raised dais and penned in by velvet ropes. Under its great wheels, long plastic fronds of coastal grass were matted flat.
I decided to start in the parking lot. It might be the center of the formation and the box-mall-church, or only a calcification or a reef built up on all sides of a cement lake. It may also have been that I couldn’t take the glossy-lipped girls with the clipboards, the graduating class of None of Us Are Getting There Anyway, milling and spraying themselves with tester bottles off the cosmetic counters because nothing masks the blood and fear like Jubilant Day and Rapture, each with proprietary blends of torrential oils and myrrh. I went straight out the side door into the west lot and started mapping it in my field journal, walking it in ten-foot sections.
Map of Carnage
Notes on the Geomorphology of the West Parking Lot
The west parking lot stretches from the foothills of the box-mall-church to the edge of the Batholith, Wal-Mart. It is an arid basin shaped like a T and dotted with express banks. Across from the basin is a range of ancillary sub-malls. The cultural micro-ecology of the lot itself is clear: mobility through the social isolation of cars—oil wars, climate control, our primary method of civic discourse, the bumper sticker—are all factors in its evolution.
Lithography of the West Lot Basin: An Analysis of Sections
1) What Would Scooby Do?
A social-cultural laccolith of sanitized pot-smoking van kids, intruding laterally and prying apart two planes—a narrative mythologizing California beach life in the wake of the pill (below) and the Jesus freak movement the early 70s (above), which trended toward communism and anti-war sentiment as an example of first-century Christianity.
2) Sure You Can Trust the Government, Just Ask An Indian:
The statement then refers to a revised history that aligns “The Land / Noble Savage” with the values of the “Frontier / Frontiersman” creating a platform from which to promote the sale of semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles.
I tore out a sheet of paper and started over.
Notes for Further Consideration
1) Maybe the box-mall-church is the Piazza?
2) Maybe that road to Wal-Mart is the grand avenue leading to the gates of the castle. A new city set upon a new hill.
At that exact moment, a bomb went off downtown. A real bomb, in real time, that everybody heard. It destroyed the executive bathroom of the New Land Trust building. The whole area was evacuated. First responders surrounded the New Land Trust. There were no casualties but security measures were being implemented. Public transit switched to snow routes and on every TV screen in the country smoke from the executive bathroom curled up and out of the frame.
I heard about the bombing on the bus ride home. When the man told me about it, I thought he was lying. Then I knew he wasn’t. My spine felt like a seismograph. I couldn’t breathe. I might have screamed something. Someone handed me an inhaler. Someone else told me to shut up. I took deep breaths and thought of marine deposits. Everything falls silently to the seafloor. It’s nothing personal at all.
Only the day before I’d been to the yoga studio and taken my place in the realm of rising home equity. It was so full I could barely move. The flower of gentrification, lotus spinning downstream. Raina walked to the front of the room.
She stood for a second by the window with the sun coming in on her, turning her face gold and her hair auburn. And in that stream of light I watched a million particles of fiber unwoven and unmeshed, freed from what we’d made of them—cars, rubber bands,