Cape-Abilities

Back in the seventeen hundreds somewhere, guy named Capability Brown, landscape architect, used to walk onto English country estates and declare: “Place has capabilities!” Transformed the formal French garden into what we now revere as the English countryside, vast lawns and trees and lakes, the beauty of the natural England, aesthetic of a golf course. He didn’t wear a cape, but he revived the pretty of what was already there.

Stretch of road between Grandin and Florahome, short stretch between two small places, is where I came upon a dead man. He wasn’t really dead, turns out he was just a drunken epileptic whose wife had thrown him out of a car while they were having a fight. I try to look for the place in the road where it happened, how I came around the bend on a new moon night, no street lights. There was a rise just beyond where the man lay, one arm in the lane, place where I stopped my car. I can pick out three places where it happened. One of them has got to be right. I’m unaccustomed to rescues. I fail the details.

An auto accident makes very little noise. Perhaps it makes no noise at all if I hadn’t been there to witness it. Saw it coming a quarter of a mile before it happened: a delivery van accelerating, weaving. The guy smashed his job right into a guardrail, ran the engine block square into the blunt end of the rail as if he were aiming for a clenched fist. The van bounced back and slowly rolled off on its rims toward the opposite shoulder. The driver wasn’t hurt, but he’d sure lost his job. And he knew it. Big man. Wept. Nothing I could do about it.

After, I drove to the end of the earth, but the beach was crowded with spring breakers. I imagined I was some spectacle to them, fully clothed and surrounded by families of bathing suits. Still, it felt good to put my toes in the cold ocean, to know there’s something bigger out there than I am.

Superman dated Lois Lane, “Low Us Lain.” I watched his movie again recently. It’s back from when Gene Hackman had hair, before Marlon Brando became a Godfather, and when a white man could still get away with a name “Jor-El”. It’s when Christopher Reeve was still alive and could fly.

The movie was filmed on grand stages before sets were digitized into virtuity, filmed when the term “green room” meant “area of refreshment.” Director Richard Donner takes his time to show us the grandeur of the ice palace and the wonder of Superman’s abilities. We go through minutes of flying dreams, when flying was new, and those were the best dreams anyone could ever have. My gosh the movie is slow, slow motion super powers, slow, seductive Hollywood, won’t you sleep in my crypt-tonight? The only thing Superman does quickly is change clothes, and even then he’s got his briefs on the outside.

Solving the Y2K problem was supposed to keep airplanes in the air and businesses grounded. Yet the exact opposite has happened. The word “sublime” became confused with “subprime” in the same way you could reverse “focus” and “fuck us”. This place, this economy, this market needs something out there bigger than I am, bigger than my mortgage, bigger than a thousand other mortgages, someone with cape-abilities…Ben Bernanke in tights!

In the meantime, here are emoticons to express what you can’t bring words to.

EMOTICONS for today’s economy by C. J. Godwin

:-) No new subprime lenders went bust today

:-( Another mortgage lender filed for bankruptcy

=I:-)= The Fed is going to adjust the rate

*:o) Bernanke is a bozo

:(=) Jimmy Carter led a better oil crisis

+<:-) The Pope to make an appeal for economic stability

}:- Bullshit market

~~ 8 Bearshit market

:-o Uh-oh, what was that?

:-@ I hear screaming

B) Now donning protective goggles

.-) Tell me when it’s safe to open both eyes

:- # Kiss your ass good-bye