NEW FRANCE ©ped Fourteen Marc’s Radicalization I think of my father when I’m on this road. When I was a boy, my old man would take me along with him on business trips to the north—La Crosse, Eau Claire, Minneapolis, Duluth. It all started here for the first hour on this little road. His face would be seized with manufactured hope, his posture was upright, and his eyes would glaze over with delusional ambition—some would call it the zombie glow of survival. He was one of the last late champions of animal agriculture. He sold hormones, steroids, and poisons to the methane fields and the coops, the stockyards and the pens. The back of his truck was gilled with endless boxes of vials, bags, and needles, the boxes all printed with sunny brand names and proprietary rights notices. The highways would branch before us like some murderous circulatory system, and we would keep our schedule. I’d listen to the radio in the truck while he would lock up contracts and renewals, an hour at a time. The radio would play funeral parlor evangelical shit while commercial bumpers touted fuels, fertilizers, implement repair and the like. Burger wrappers littered the truck. We’d hole up for a night in a motel on the business loop. On a lucky night, I’d get a whole taco salad. My dad would tell me about the highlights of his meetings that day; he’d tell me about the asshole from Tomah who wouldn’t renew because his third wife didn’t like the practice of ‘juicing’ their chickens, he’d laugh about the angry maven at the St. Croix Hatchery who’d rush through the contracts like it was a backstreet abortion, he’d preach about the cattlemen who’d give us vacuum-sealed bandoliers of our own chemicals imbedded in their meat—a holiday stocking stuffer, clear veils of draped meat on meat, soaked in chemical anointment for the federal capital supply chain. My dad was dying from this line of living, hell, he smoked a carton of Merits a week and pissed through a catheter that traveled through a borehole in the driver’s side floorboard. Sometimes, on nights when I stayed at home, I fell asleep imagining my father chaining Merits and peeing at eighty miles an hour just to land another poisonous bid on time. When he died, my mother wasn’t surprised. He died of a heart attack at a truck stop, seven a.m. under the bright and guiding and natural sun. The employer, his employer, a giant of a laboratory, a laboratory which served power in Washington, gave our family a free casket and ten thousand dollars for our troubles. I remember my mother going dull during the week of the funeral. There was an unnatural relief in her eyes, something akin to a weary wait—she told me to study for college, and to study as if my very young life depended on it. I remember laughing at her command even on the day she said it; I never saw a connection between studying hard and avoiding the plagues of our civilization. As if an understanding of our systemic self-destruction would somehow tenderize the sacrifices ahead—as if naming the broad extinction around us would endow us all with a wieldy power over the extinction…I suppose the only alternative to prayer back then was the salve of education. I suppose the uncountable eras of experience, the loops of failing empire, weren’t enough to convince our species to laugh off our shortcomings.
When the Rivers Turn to Glass
When the Rivers Turn to Glass
When the Rivers Turn to Glass
NEW FRANCE ©ped Fourteen Marc’s Radicalization I think of my father when I’m on this road. When I was a boy, my old man would take me along with him on business trips to the north—La Crosse, Eau Claire, Minneapolis, Duluth. It all started here for the first hour on this little road. His face would be seized with manufactured hope, his posture was upright, and his eyes would glaze over with delusional ambition—some would call it the zombie glow of survival. He was one of the last late champions of animal agriculture. He sold hormones, steroids, and poisons to the methane fields and the coops, the stockyards and the pens. The back of his truck was gilled with endless boxes of vials, bags, and needles, the boxes all printed with sunny brand names and proprietary rights notices. The highways would branch before us like some murderous circulatory system, and we would keep our schedule. I’d listen to the radio in the truck while he would lock up contracts and renewals, an hour at a time. The radio would play funeral parlor evangelical shit while commercial bumpers touted fuels, fertilizers, implement repair and the like. Burger wrappers littered the truck. We’d hole up for a night in a motel on the business loop. On a lucky night, I’d get a whole taco salad. My dad would tell me about the highlights of his meetings that day; he’d tell me about the asshole from Tomah who wouldn’t renew because his third wife didn’t like the practice of ‘juicing’ their chickens, he’d laugh about the angry maven at the St. Croix Hatchery who’d rush through the contracts like it was a backstreet abortion, he’d preach about the cattlemen who’d give us vacuum-sealed bandoliers of our own chemicals imbedded in their meat—a holiday stocking stuffer, clear veils of draped meat on meat, soaked in chemical anointment for the federal capital supply chain. My dad was dying from this line of living, hell, he smoked a carton of Merits a week and pissed through a catheter that traveled through a borehole in the driver’s side floorboard. Sometimes, on nights when I stayed at home, I fell asleep imagining my father chaining Merits and peeing at eighty miles an hour just to land another poisonous bid on time. When he died, my mother wasn’t surprised. He died of a heart attack at a truck stop, seven a.m. under the bright and guiding and natural sun. The employer, his employer, a giant of a laboratory, a laboratory which served power in Washington, gave our family a free casket and ten thousand dollars for our troubles. I remember my mother going dull during the week of the funeral. There was an unnatural relief in her eyes, something akin to a weary wait—she told me to study for college, and to study as if my very young life depended on it. I remember laughing at her command even on the day she said it; I never saw a connection between studying hard and avoiding the plagues of our civilization. As if an understanding of our systemic self-destruction would somehow tenderize the sacrifices ahead—as if naming the broad extinction around us would endow us all with a wieldy power over the extinction…I suppose the only alternative to prayer back then was the salve of education. I suppose the uncountable eras of experience, the loops of failing empire, weren’t enough to convince our species to laugh off our shortcomings.