DO NOT LEAVE VALUABLES IN VEHICLE

James Bowden

Today, I’m on top of a hill. Tomorrow, at the bottom of the sea, but let’s leave that aside for now, shan’t we?
Today I am on top of a hill.
There’s a Holocaust memorial, bodies of plaster twisted on the floor and on each other
while a lone Jew looks out through some not-so-endless barbed wire that is not-so-tied around some
not-so-real tree trunks. Rather skinny ones at that, as if they must match their captives’ emaciation.
That’s my mom’s grandma on the floor there.
Don’t worry, my grandma survived the Holocaust, even if just long enough to make me possible and get hit by
a car 14 months later.
So it goes.

Grand theft auto. A fine name for a video game, and for the hasty getaway those men made, one wearing
some sort of ski mask, and I’m not even sure the other was indeed a man.
I saw them break the car window and drive off with it, the confirmed man halfway out the window and waving
in victory and in fuck you. Come to think of it, I didn’t see them break the car window, but I heard the victim
say it.
Picture this: a rather effeminate male voice, repeatedly exclaiming, Babe, oh my god
and what did they get??? and they took your phone?? and they took your purse too?! what was in it? and
another Babe, oh my god and perhaps a We need to call the cops, babe, babe!
Babe, oh my god! The aforenamed Babe, a girl in a puffy white dress that isn’t quite a wedding dress but could
be. I think the car was hers, not his, but he is still the vessel for emotion, and Babe, oh my god! The police
come rushing up, one car, then another, and I can’t imagine what they’ll say or do. In my perverse mind, they
point to the sign and shrug, maybe laugh if their parents were assholes too.
They’ll have to dump the car somewhere anyway, right? Let us look for it then, I suppose.
They just wanted to take some pictures.
Maybe they cannot pay for the wedding anymore after replacing the phone and the laptop and the bag and
the dress not to mention the car but then again maybe they were not getting married anyway for what Babe
wore didn’t look like much of a wedding dress to me
not that I am a credible source.
So it goes?

Ain’t it lovely that we needn’t turn to fiction for absurdity? That I could put Vonnegut out of a job, were he still
alive? And really, it does go so.

It’s foggy as hell and I’m bored. I don’t care how smart these people are: I’m pining and horny. It’s nice outside
and there’s plenty to do and nobody to do it with.

Isn’t it telling that I’m more envious of Richard Brautigan and his poet-in-residence spot than anyone else I’ve
heard of at Caltech? Today, maybe, I am on a hill, but certainly not a mountain, and I confessed that writing
some nice stuff would make me indelibly happy
Now, that would put me on a mountain.
It scares me how certain I am of that. And how unprepared and unable I feel, how trapped I feel for someone
with alleged infinite potential.
Maybe I can just do it on the side. Yet this is both proof that I can, and a suggestion that I probably won’t.

Isn’t it a scary thought that I might be my own muse? That I haven’t even a spiky (or should I say shrike-y),
imposing muse like Martin Silenus, or even half as many years to write for that matter?

I’d very much like to conclude with a fat

DON’T HAVE VALUABLES

for then, surely, we would not leave them in our vehicles, nor lose them.

But as someone with neither a vehicle nor valuables, this strikes me as a very unsatisfying conclusion. Instead, I
will end with

HAVE AS MANY VALUABLES AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE

for then you may lose as many as is possible, and that shellshocked man and the fact that he can say Babe, oh
my god, Babe, now that, not Brautigan’s position itself,
that is truly enviable.