The Flag as a Symbol of Love and Hate for Private Use

The first thing that comes to mind at the mention of America is a small flag. Not an enormous banner, but precisely a little flag, the kind that they like to fill the open spaces with in the United States. A certain amount of stripes resembling a marvelous staircase, the number of steps impossible to remember, and stars, forming the largest constellation in the sky:

· Hendrix. At the age of fourteen my buddies and I believed in all seriousness that he had six fingers on each hand. And I still believe that somewhere recordings of the sounds from his burning guitar are being stored.

· The Zippo lighter. The most precious thing in my pocket. I call it: “gas mini-factory, full of interjections of delicious flicks and scars of air, which my fingers so love to touch.”

· Jasper Jones. Behind his drawing I hid one of my books.

· The Simpsons. I am absolutely sure that it helped me save my family three years ago.

· Jeremy Wolf. Photographer. Because of him I cut up hundreds of my photographs, trying to glue from their remains glossy imaginary animals.

· Tom Waits. A voice that makes everyone cry who knows or is learning to cry in my apartment.

· A little beautiful girl Cuba, whose body continues to exist in spite of other girls, northern and unattractive.

· Hollywood comedy. Sometimes this is so scary that you can make out the outlines of hell.

· Robert Frost, any one of whose poems always has at its head not its title but a hanging light bulb with incredible patterns of electricity inside.

· Laurie Anderson. Her albums are made of miraculously preserved sounds, which never fit into a music box.

· Comics, the most uninteresting death of the book. I know of more interesting.

· American football, stealing the name from the European game and causing it to die as soccer.

· The electronic magician Moby, inserting by turn in each of eighteen rabbit hats a female rabbit.

· Gum. I remember a boy from another class who beat his seven-year-old sister so brutally for eating his precious stick of Wrigley’s that a few days later she died. This was in 1979.

· French fries from McDonald’s--the yellow keys of a mechanical piano.

· The annihilated North American Indians; for some reason I didn’t like to play Indians as a child.

· Johnny Depp, who died for Jarmusch at that moment when the film was only supposed to be beginning.

· Joel Peter Witkin, who keeps in every pocket of his coat exactly the number of frightening photographs that he will need to frighten someone just a tiny bit.

· The non-face of the current President.

· Rage Against The Machine--Belorussian guerillas from L.A., playing on musical locomotives that fly through the air.

· Bukowski’s hippodromes, where poetic horses gallop.

· Woodstock, the state of dream of every musician, artist, poet.

· Ezra Pound, lost in time, reading poems written after death on Belgrade radio.

· Clinton’s unfortunate sperm.

· Strange schools, in which children aren’t required to know how to read.

· Towheaded, suicidal Kurt Cobain, who named his unborn daughter Bean when he saw her on the ultrasound monitor.

· Tiffany’s frail breakfast in my kitchen.

· Burroughs, digging through the brains of my friends.

· Mulholland Drive, a road on which in America only a few people drive. I think the majority of them are women.

· Warhol, squeezing his numerous Marilyns to his chest so tightly that they age noticeably.

· AIDS. Since the time of the first alarm seventeen years have passed, and I, fortunately, have not seen a single person infected with the AIDS virus.

· Baseball, resembling the game of chess.

· Dead Serbian girls with umbrellas during the bombings.

· The little dog from the American dream, lost forever in the house with too many rooms.

It seems that the stars and stripes have run out. You can turn the flag over.