Texted Rey-Rey that we needed to get back up and go back into the tunnels to do work but I doubt he received the text as service is spotty in central Virginia, and non-existent in time tunnels underneath the earth of Buckingham County. Probably for the best though, as the greatest places on this wondrous planet remain out of gridlock’s service area. But me and Rey-Rey had a standing meeting point during moments of quest conflict like this, where we would think really hard into the aether “MEET UP! MEET UP!” and we’d connect at Ali’s.
Ali’s is a country store that has been owned by like five other people since the actual Ali owned it, but it was Ali’s for so long that it remains “Ali’s” in local country colloquial lore. Ali’s was famous for its fried chicken, which at one point I ranked as top in all the world (with my world being rural Virginia mostly, but assorted other travels expand that realm of self-knowledge from time-to-time). Various other owners have not held up that same Ali’s standard of fried country store food though, including some owners a couple back who very obviously did not care to switch out their grease often enough, and the fried chicken tasted of fried fish. Now don’t get me wrong, fried fish good as fuck too, but if I’m digging into an all-thigh 3-piece, I ain’t trying to taste no catfish.
So I went to Ali’s, got myself a cheap shitty coffee in styrofoam cup, heavy with the hazelnut creamer. There is something pure and beautiful about shitty country store (and also shitty gas station or truck stop) coffee. Coffee bean is definitely a sufferer of the ill effects of slave plant status, and there remains a capitalist mythos around coffee, so that hipster start-up venture idealists will create these allegedly sustainable third world farm to first world mouthhole fables about superior coffee experiences. Unfortunately, these also have elite first world price tags, and I am – despite my elevated financial status at this point in my life, as compared to the rest of my life as well as the rest of the world – still solid in my principle that I’m not paying more for a single cup of coffee than a five pound bag of brown rice costs. Like seriously, if you cooked up the whole five pound bag of rice and put it in a giant serving dish with a nice wooden spoon on a table next to a single cup of superior handcrafted artisanal coffee, how could you justify such an expense?
But I got me a shitty cup of coffee, avoided the siren smell artery devil allure of the fried chicken, and sat outside at one of the picnic tables. Picnic tables are made from white trash wood mostly, so are fairly cheap as well, thus it is not hard to accumulate picnic tables over the years, committing new ones to the overall compound, whether commercial or private, as older ones get retired to the burnpile because they are too rotten to be safe. Each table is made from roughly 16 pieces of wood, bolted together, which means it could come from as many as 16 different trees. Each of these trees had its own history before being harvested senselessly by mad monkeyhead machines and murdered into shapes better for building things like picnic tables and unaffordable housing and extended decks for overlooking earth privilege.
I practice energetics work with picnic tables though, trying to feel out the history of the plants used, as well as how much old lounger energy has been added. Old loungers congregate at places like Ali’s, talking about all sorts of old country lounger bullshit. Thus, pinewood tree base plus additional lounger energies congeal together in that aether-style other realm, like an aura but for an object, to where when I’m practicing these energetics, you walk by one picnic table and it’ll feel strong a little bit, or one will feel really new, even if it doesn’t look it. (This is common with pine, because it’s harvested so young; it barely ever has a change to achieve elder status in the wild, which is never really wild but on tree farms.) But you’ll find the right one that old fuckers have talked about their magical little corners of the world in great detail, and the wood from the table will have come from trees properly saturated with feral earth energies, perhaps wandering coyotes or better yet mythical tomewolves, which still exist even though they are regarded by science as false. (Perhaps science itself is false, who is to say?) You will pass this picnic table, and it will say “I’m the one” in that non-verbal way that the truest of things all use. I passed one outside of Ali’s which did this, and being I had thought the psychic “MEET UP!” thoughts in abundance towards Rey-Rey’s general direction in the multiple universe, I sat down and sipped on my coffee at the picnic table. Hundreds of other lives meandered past in even that first few minutes, and when you thought about maybe all those lives had infinite versions of their own selves going on all around the multiple universes as well, I guess it could overwhelm an overly scientific mind, but to me it felt like we were all covered by this beautiful crazy quilt of infinite threads of life, all woven together in unexplainable by human words ways. I found it very comforting in its immensity.
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