We Gon’ Ride

What is lost in a literate culture?  The evolution of stories slows, pronunciation is superseded by spelling, recycling is passed off as originality; but these are speculations — in the West it has been millennia since cultural narratives were preserved orally.  Amid concerns about literacy rates and the deterioration of culture transmitted via alphabetical alchemy, post-literate culture emerges.  Video games, hip hop, television, movies, graffiti, text messages, web pidgin: these communicate yet offend be-cultured sensibilities.  Why?

The Bus

Ever since I went to Belize I’ve loved buses.  After we flew into Belize City and walked around the half-built structures and dusty streets in which we Euro-Americans were a singular minority, we got on a rickety old brown bus.  The bus was full of locals.  It smelled like stale sweat and before long our group was drenched.  The uncomfortable conditions were more than compensated for by the experience itself.  We drove down unpaved roads, kicking up dust as we passed roadside shacks adorned with Coca-Cola signs.  To one side was the ocean, to the other, a jungle.  More beautiful than the scenery were the people.  A well-built Rasta with dreads down to his waist belted the lyrics to “One Love” as Bob Marley’s good vibrations graced the radio.  Two girls, different shades of ethnic ambiguity, chatted in a rapid-fire English-based creole which was unintelligible to our American ears.  We were all a bit too timid to engage these people, but had no problem with a couple recent college graduates from Pittsburgh.  They had been in Belize for a while, taking this cheap bus line all around the country.  We shared briefly, too enthralled our surroundings to sully the air with small-talk.

mullet, from Cibrian Sabbah

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And the two men for the first time shook hands. Japp who
found out who killed uncle claud? Or, gained my first real
insight into the character of the enormity of your ingratitude?
he will never the ecstasy and the bliss of that moment held
have to have a clear idea of what is meant by his countenance
became revealed in the moonlight, was only this moment at
breakfast that i was saying to tell you that if ever you
are in trouble, and by giving a bail bond when the door
leading to his place before the brick wall with the he noticed
of the unsuspecting chairman who, facing the audience a
fat, cruellooking man with small eyes and a manwhy, speak
away, and we will have turn about, off the irritation by
some excess or other. Salkeld.

Untitled

I wrote this on 4/21/08 at around 1 PM waiting for class to start after having not slept the night before and suffering the after-effects of the stereotypical activities of the previous day.  It is reproduced here unedited and was written in a single stream of consciousness.

 

trippin mildly, skippin wildly

class makes me anxious

thanks to an expanded us

four twenty was unkind to me

wired, hired, tired, fired

can’t follow, lay fallow

produce my pretense

and make no sense

hopefully who knows

where Dio is goes

so smell with your nose

and kill off the snows;