Bridge To Nowhere

As I watch the planes fly overhead and the tanks rumble down I-10 toward the Texas Nation.  Operation Jade Spear and Magic Helmet is moving to keep migrating Texans from stumbling over the border looking for work.  But I don't want to talk about Politics...God knows that's pointless and boring...you get what you vote for...

But I do admire the conviction in the young men's faces.  They're so determined to keep the union together for another twenty years until Texas decides it doesn't want to be a state again.  But I nearly served in Operation Distraction, literally thirty minutes from the draft. Yeah, Vietnam sucked for you guys, but at least the got rid of the draft over there.

The thing that I have to ponder as I sit on top of the railing on the Bridge between Loisiana and Texas as you see Petuniaville sprawling out to the East, sprawling as far as the eye can see, billowing fumes of every color of a demented electric Ozian rainbow flowing up into a chartruse and vomit emerald sky.  There's no fire quite like an oil fire, and for those rare portals to fiction in the sky you can see (if you know how to look) the choking faces of giants and genies and Pegasus as they try not to breath in the burning blood of the Earth.

It's hell.  War is hell of course but this is something else again.  Ring after ring ripples in the heat, distorting ten as the tanks drive by.  Every third vehicle is a tanker since the enemy is known to cut supply lines (given the rather ineffective weaponry they have compared to a modern militiary.)  Texas is the most armed nation on Earth...but by treaty they don't have anything manufactured (legally) after 1910....oops?

When I look at the Bridge in the Bayou, I see a bridge everywhere, worlds of hope and terror with possibilities and adventure  I have generally been too cowardly to take.  When I look at the Bridge over the River, a see a bridge to nowhere...going nowhere with no hope.  There won't be any lasting change, not when people don't want it.  What is the point of war? It is mankind's most destructive endevor.

I take swig from my flask, once again considering the dramatis personae potential of lighting a cigarette I wouldn't smoke, or even a lollipop Kojak style.  But I shrug and begin to walk down, passing the occasional straggler, walking slowly after the tanks.  Even in this era there are Camp Followers, that curious ecology of war that depend on destructionfor existance. Its a bit like an oasis in the desert in a sick sort of way.

Until later.