GARY PANTER BLOG

Yogi Bear, Wally Gator and Tennessee Tuxedo and That Walrus that hangs out with Tennessee are on this big raft going through the jungle. Creepers, shoots, lianas and flowering tubers erupt and pustulate all round the frolicsome group as they roll downstream around elbows in the tributary and whitewater features replete with jumping packs of piranha chattering their choppers and flashing mirror-like scales. Smoke swirls around the volcano.

Yogi looks first at Wally, then to Tennessee, then to Atom Ant who he didn’t know was on the boat until this moment and says to no one in particular, but not the walrus whom he disdains for no reason he can put his finger on, maybe a simple lack of formal introduction never enacted by the hatted penguin, “Hey, Boo Boo, do you hear something?”

Atom Ant looks up brightly and shouts in a shrill ant-like voice “I’ll fly up above the forest canopy and check it out!!!” He flies straight up out of sight and never looks back.

Wally Gator looks down after a spell with a baffled expression on his log-like puss and says to Yogi in a voice that sounds like Daws Butler imitating Phil Silvers or maybe Bert Lahr, “Yeah, Yogi, now that you mention it, I hear some kind of consonant, unceasing, dull, roar. Do you hear anything Tennessee? Chumley?”

“Why Wally, Chumley hasn’t heard so much as a peep since you fired off that magazine earlier, trying to shoot a mosquito off his head. Isn’t that right, Chumley?”

Chumley says, “I can’t hear what the hell you guys are talking about, but the river falls out of sight ahead”

Everyone on the raft blinks as a man and gulps. By now Atom Ant has struck gold in China.

I love bird watching in Texas. I was in Sulphur Springs a couple of weeks ago sodding the lawn for Mother and Daddy, and everywhere were birds. Daddy and I drove to Winnsboro a couple of times for sod and I spied about 8 red cardinals, about 30 scissor-tailed flycatchers, some giant hawks, always buzzards, always white cranes. No road-runners.

When I arrived at DFW, there were no rental cars to be had; a giant crowd of people was at the rental center and as people turned in cars they called out names and agitated renters filed to the lot one by one. My brother Tommy and his wife Gwen were nice enough to drop everything in Riley Springs and drive over and pick me up from where I was waiting downstairs, feeding the birds (many kinds) bits of sandwich and drawing them in my sketchbook.

Saw four dead crows on the ground in front of the public school across from Braums—made me wonder if there is an electrical short on the electrical lines over there?

One day I had biscuits and gravy from Braums, lunch at the outlet mall Mexican place, and later a foot-long cheese coney, tater tots and a shake at the new Sonic. The first time I’ve been to the Sonic in my dad’s pick-up. I noticed that every car there was a pick-up and that they all had their motors running the whole time for air-conditioner purposes. His air-conditioner is broke so I just breathed everyone elses’s smoke. One car pulled in—a couple of black kids in an old Malibu, outfitted with those new style giganto spin rims. I ask one of them how much the rims cost. I am hard of hearing, but I am pretty sure that he said $1200.00 a wheel!!!!!!!!!! Thats a lot of biscuits and gravy. Breakfast the next day at Bodacious on the way to the airport. Got out of town before I exploded.

Paris, Texas has never been the same to me since they shut down Speas vinegar, so now there’s nothing to smell by the railroad tracks on the way to Oklahoma. Nothing good anyhow anymore.

I used to meditate in Commerce with some sufis. We held hands and chanted and it was fun and relaxing, we learned some simple mediation brain-quieting techniques,very helpful, until they all started astrally projecting and doing so much aura cleansing. I got out of there at that point. I wasn’t wanting to zoom around out of my body. But it was nice and I made some friends.

One very nice guy in the sufi meditation group, who was really into aura cleansing, was living in Paris. And he said there was this isolated spot in Paris where he would rake off or dump all the bad vibes in his arms and hands and shoulders that he accumulated from cleansing other people’s auras. And he said nothing grew there— that it was a dead burnt ring about thirty feet across in a pasture. Killed by the bad vibes from the auras of now-happy folks.

So I am guessing that this is part of the problem in Paris—that this sufi gentleman, since the early ’70s, has been harvesting bad vibes from Quitman, Mineola, North Caney, Harlingen, Wolfe City, Fairley, Granger, Lubbock, Tyler—all the places he cleansed auras—Texarkana, Laredo, Reilly Springs, Yantis, Baird, Marfa—and he has gradually completely destroyed the karmic balance in Paris, Texas, by shipping all that woe into his private little woe dump.