It was a longer week than normal, for a couple of reasons, but mainly because the monsoon cranked itself up again at an absurdly late date, and the rain didn’t stop coming down hard for two days down here along the border. Or so it seemed to me–it might have been a Chinese hoax. It was bad enough that I retrieved an old folding umbrella from under the front seat of my car, for the first time in a decade or maybe more.
Trialsome, tedious, but it all ended more or less on schedule tonight. I walked out of the classroom, dropped off a big piece of network hardware in my office, and wandered out again somewhat blearily across the campus toward the hill of the twin pine to begin restoring my nominal sanity.
Halfway there, in the center of campus, I caught movement from something big-dog size about 100 strides away. But it wasn’t a dog, no, it was … a javelina. No, it was … three . Four. Ten. Twenty or so all told.
Now you know, because I told you, and because you are the most devoted of readers, that this happened before, sort of. The night of graduation in May, very late, I stopped by my office one last time before heading off on my liberty. I saw them in the completely deserted parking lot and even took some really shitty pictures with my phone, remember? I don’t recall if I used the word Omen then, but it damn sure was one, and I interpreted it to be the very best kind. Wild pigs, who knew no sane person would be around then, claiming the lot as their own. Freedom. They were free, and reclaiming what was once theirs, just like me.
They are without question the totem of this place writ large, the very spirit of this river valley that stretches dozens of miles north and across the so-called border south into the land of other, more contingent symbols of freedom.
And they were telling me, in May, like shy smoke spirits, that they knew my heart.
But now it is September, and they were anything but shy. The strode through the middle, not the margins, like they owned the place, like pig spirit wasn’t content to peck around the outer lots anymore, but were taking the heart in broad moonlight. In fact, as I approached from an oblique angle, one of the big ones bringing up the rear stopped, and pointedly held its ground with a stare that meant business. I listened. I stopped too.
They continued on in a straggling line right up over the top of the twin pine hill. I followed at a respectful distance, making sure they were well past before I took it back over for myself in turn.
In May I knew right away what the omen was saying.
But after a couple of hours of consideration, I’m still not totally clear on what this one means.
I see two main possibilities.
The dark interpretation is that the shooter-cop authoritarian pig spirit is ascending and growing in ugly chokehold power in the very heart of the school-beast, with no reason to fear anymore. This symbolism is supported by a number of clues, including a public posting on the school’s message board for some new right-wing club. The posting was entitled “Gun Control is Racist”, which was apparently also the name of a video linked within by the very white student who is apparently organizing the club.
It is also supported by a number of interactions still closer to home, with people like the Colonel and the General now too. But they’ve distracted me enough for one day from the real point–of this post and of my life and work.
The light interpretation is that the freedom is growing in boldness within me. Not just the passive freedom of school’s out for the summer, but a more active kind that is preparing itself calmly to tell real people, genuine authorities, in person, that the time has come for them to piss up a rope, get bent, just do whatever they’re gonna do and stop hinting around and bothering me about what they might. Put up or shut up, motherfuckers. I grow impatient with your little games, and I am feeling less vulnerable than I have since the Troubles began. I know you can cut me off from the good citizen life of paying my bills on time and having three flavors of insurance and a mortgage. Just do it, if you’re gonna. Only quit fouling my shoes with your pissy little passive aggression and unartfully veiled swinging of your tiny dicks. I can take anything you can dish, and even do it with a smile now that I’ve practiced. But of that crap, dears, I have had quite enough.
This symbolism too has evidence to support it.
I have been wickedly fierce of late.
Perhaps that last sentence was redundant.
In the course of the Spill (and this is what it is so good for), right now, I begin to see a third form of the omen, a synthesis of the darkness and the light.
What if the pigs were saying that both things are true?
What if the forces of darkness and the force of light are both expanding with infinite speed in this random moment in the middle of yet another semester?
Well I’ll tell you what then. First a crash and a clash and a scream and a sharp shooting pain, and I mean on both sides.
And then … full circle.
Full circle back around to the original interpretation of the omen of the herd of tusked swine.
Back around.
To Liberty, Mayday and Liberty.