Origin
There comes a point where the social induction of fear no longer registers, where she’s blown out all circuits, fried the neurology defunct, no longer communally accessible. And while I had known Seidel Road beforehand, with this point of departure, I came to see her differently, all due by a tad too hot a sprinkling of the socialized terror stimuli bracing broadly across all American society, exceeding quaint fears of dreamy meteors, blast illuminations, childhood’s terrorists, drug lords, adolescent white incinerations, adulthood’s cartel executions of traitors, on into intergenerational folklores regarding the rapidities of snipers, ambushes, drugs to take before diving into an enemy tunnel, strategic soundness of many knives, let alone the fright unique to shaped explosions, sculpted molten spears, flechettes, planes flipping and plunging portside at take-off, air-to-air missiles, swift as viscous spunks melting faces, adrenal prison shivvings, those energies ripping open fuselages, ribs aluminum, marrowed, and yet nothing like the grizzly physics terminating astronauts, asphyxiations by hypergravities, rendings by the deeply classified, like the secret launch disasters, astral sublimations, irradiations, crew psychoses, lose one R-5E for every four you send through, training accidents, Neutrino tank blowouts, astral incidents returning your commandos as apostolic peaceniks with inexplicably heightened charismic parables, and they far from the worst of the hauntings lurking still the more forelorn parts of facilities seventy seven through thirty three, nope, never need to go there, no thank you, even anywhere adjacent those whole disused vastnesses abbreviated in requests for clean-up proposals as “wings” and “areas,” where the initiated parlance marvels at these “subterranean metropoli,” and “cities of sin” safely cradled in the guts of mountains, mines and inexplicable berths only accidentally discovered.
What does it tell you that not even the nerds will investigate them for data centers, carbon offsets, and there they lie, lightless labyrinths, geologies cradling slimes that glow winkingly bright and as rapidly discolor themselves inert as if in chromatic flight, neon mirages kicking, smiling, choreographies unclear, and watch for the strange rats furred as clumps of fiber, scurrying Gigeresque tentacles, who wants to mess with such hissing malfunctions?
Better that they were masoned over several decades ago, and yet with Seidel Road, no matter how menacing America, how sinister the incoming unleashed, how ample and avid the perfidy, the ease of all scandal, devilry diffuse and pervasive, lucrative, invested, respirated, spectacle deliciousness, crashed expectations, survival, subverting revelation for hilarity of “going to Mars,” nevermind whatever “space,” up there actually is, the strangenesses where most of the strategic physics applications are maintained, that’s what a nominal Space Force would guard, not mere earth orbit. They aren’t space junk litter rangers, not when there’s been a technologically constructed hyperspace from which all else can be dialed into, even physically entered.
But yes, the Red Planet must be important too. One wonders what they had invented before kaput? Did they make it to a great computerized social experiment? “Imagine the sorting” we were asked to wonder, being just on the verge of poptimistic finally delivering, and with that psychology we fathomed whatever made happy commuters topple face first into Wuhan’s handsome sidewalks, and edits later into the ethereal embraces of biopolitically armored medical figures? Once all those psychotronic mechanisms had done their work on me, there was very little that was certain or clear, nothing beyond Seidel Road, at least.
And I had known Seidel from before her suburbanization when she was mainly a secret, unsettled, an almost agri-exurb of rural Orange County, crammed with arboreal sprawl, messes of shrubs, renaissances of gnarly bushes barbed by miniscule flowers, grasses person high, and through these zones darted things barely caught by phone lamp, brushes, pitters, canine-ish hind quarters, choosing the path of my particular and lonesome egress to specifically dart in front, a coincidental collection of them.
And in this way Seidel Road greets her runners, walkers, maybe even the bicyclists, where giving our all upon Seidel, we are sometimes gifted animisms, timely birdflight, songs, each synchronized to one’s most private prayers, incantations, laden promises, reconciliations, rivettings, and you will have given yourself, shattered swords clanked into unglanced mud, temples banished to reliquaries, pyramids pitting, all by grace alone on Seidel Road, by whatever altar, shoe tread, tire width, there we are ready to die, and unable to unsee, to not acknowledge the strange parting of cloud, brightly colored finches, creatures notable even to avian naif, and, yes, sometimes only crows are needed and othertimes you are chilled by the shadows of majestic cranes swinging paths over ours, all these events discrete as burning bushes, archangel dream guides, by Seidel Road an enchanted ecology awaits the athletic. There was once even sighted, classifiable to a wholly different genre of phenomena, but clear as meteorological metaphor there high knee pedaling out in front of us and away from us was a too-tall for the single speed frame fair-skinned bicyclist around whose head was wrapped a white bandana, and this immediately after reaching clarities of great poignancy, squarings of profound sadnesses, tunings of brutal harmonics, not the kind of oomph that winds the whole kosmogram but a kind of teacherly affirmation.
Run long enough on Seidel Road, and you may as often recoil at the confusion, convinced you were permitting your own haunting, something inhabiting you claiming identities you could not quite verify, and should be cautious and wise about what sorts of energies we incorporate upon sacred Seidel, Seidel, where the greatest of imagined hooks, stanzas, freestyles, starting lines, arcs, declarations, they are all servant to the huffing and puffing of miles three, four, five or six, and even these elements eventually blink away and there’s only manifestations of counsels convergent across centuries, civilizations and linguistic groups, purities understood only at this exertion-arrived spirituality, Seidel Road’s specialty, where all traffic is welcome and all is made better, all there thrives, but this mechanism, however mysterious, consumes all else that crackles outside this humble suburban span.
