Blowing the Lid Off DC’s Exploding Manhole Covers
by Michael S. Diamond
“Yesterday’s weirdness is tomorrow’s reason why.”
— Hunter S. Thompson
THE OTHER DAY IN CONVERSATION with my old pal JP something triggered a memory of the truly bizarre and occasionally frightening rash of exploding manhole covers in your nation’s capital. The incidence of said strange occurrences rose precipitously in the year 2000 and has persisted ever since, albeit somewhat abated, at least through 2013. Another casualty of the now forgotten Y2K computer glitch? Perhaps. An excess of the famous DC swamp gas seeping its way into the infrastructure? Maybe. The failure of PEPCO to maintain its massive high voltage cable system coursing beneath the city unawares, protected by tubes of liquid insulation whose leakage went unattended thereby permitting high voltage arcs to set off the explosions whilst PEPCO kept its costs down to keep its figures trim for the sale to Exelon that went through in 2014? A definite possibility. Those 250 pound cast-iron Frisbees tossed by an unseen giant 35 feet into the air followed by a five-foot jet of flame could not help but impress themselves in memory. To say nothing of the attendant power outages.
Memory, flaming memory. That’s the ticket. Or so my sage buddy JP proposed. “I mean,” he began, “what happens to all those forgotten memories? You know, people with Alzheimer’s and just the shit we forget all the time. What happens to that stuff?” A salient question for two sexagenarian greybeards lost in a meandering conversation. “Isn’t it just possible,” JP insisted, “that all those memories somehow build up underground and eventually just need a way out? A way to vent?” And then it hit me: he might just be right. My immediate thought was of the Huichol people of northern Mexico. Isn’t it obvious? Yes, the indigenous tribe whose religion centers upon the ingestion of hallucinogenic peyote buttons, those tiny Frisbees for accessing consciousness. The inspiration for our own homegrown hallucinatarian sect, The Native American Church. In addition to their psychedelic sacred art, the Huichol also deploy a fascinating system of interpersonal protection based on an assumed hierarchy of psychic toxicity. Stay with me.
The basic Huichol concept of mojo contamination is that the older you are the more toxic you are. Bad news fellow greybeards, but we’re kind of used to hearing that. This is the reason your kids pick your nursing home, complete with lead shielding. So the deal is that when a parent walks into the room, the little tykes are practically blown away by the charge of their mojo. A similar effect is exerted between the grandparental generation and their adult kids. The shaman blows them all away. So one way of controlling all this free-floating mojo is to bind it up in crystals, one glinting bottle cap for each mojo-producing individual, and secrete the crystals in a small wooden cupboard tacked up on the wall for just such a purpose. Now you might say problem solved, all is copacetic. Well not for long. It seems that the aging grandparental crystals begin to take on a dangerous degree of mounting toxicity, far in excess of the family fuse box’s buffering capacity. Time to take the show on the road. The ancient grandparental crystals are trucked down to caves by the sea and left there, out of harm’s way. In the fullness of time and negative ions and all that, the crystals are eventually detoxified. A sensible system.
We moderns, however, exhibit no such common sense. Why would we think that confining our elders to “senior living facilities” would do anything to diffuse their volatility? Quite the opposite, sadly. The phenomenon of mutual incineration of the elderly is the bane of the American elder care community. An excess of volatile memories at just the wrong time and place and kaboom, you have The Battle of Mojkovac all over again. Depending on the personnel involved, of course. Quite shocking to see two greybeards in wheelchairs or at the helms of their respective walkers suddenly burst into flames, not a trace left behind, save an occasional fossilized Blockbuster’s movie rental card. And what, after all, is the volatile component of every woman Jill and her Jack’s essential self? Thoughts! Yes, all that psychic flotsam and jetsam for which none of us any longer has use. There it goes, off-gassing from people’s unsuspecting crania. And where does all this gaseous effervescence end up? You guessed it! In the sewers of the Nation’s Capital!
Indeed, every outmoded concept, useless idea, frustrated conspiracy theory, dormant plan for world domination, memories of things that never happened, all of them sink under the weight of their own bathetic sogginess and plunge into the underworld of lost notions. And as the incidence of dementia has risen and stayed at a reliably high level, the memory dump is all the greater. So it is no surprise that the level of rotten thoughts has risen along with sewage gas and odiferous sludge to emerge with explosive force from our nation’s cloaca in Washington, D.C. And in fact, in regions where the manhole covers are undoubtedly not so tightly screwed down, a parallel seepage has proceeded with dangerous force to emerge throughout the countryside unawares. It is precisely the off-loading of consciousness that indeed drives this infernal process to its incendiary conclusions. Let me be clear, it is the wholesale clearing out of thought that has been taking place across the length and breadth of this great nation that is at the root of the problem. Some point the finger at television in general, others more specifically at so-called reality TV, so-called as it has been voided effectively of all meaningful content and any actual reality, flushed down the plug hole of our collective media cluelessness. And all of it, each and every blessed byte and bit, accelerated to the max by social media’s Mephistophelian algorithms.
You could feel it in the air, you could feel it in the ground. You could feel it in your innermost parts rumbling through subterranean passages of oblivion. They were worried about the Great American Zombie Apocalypse. They were sure it was coming. They emptied their minds of all else so they could prep for the impending catastrophe unencumbered by distracting facts or intrusions of reality. They were vessels waiting to be filled. And so it finally arrived in 2016, the moment they had prepped for in the inner sancta of their castles keep, filled with nothing but Fiji water, spam, Red Man chewing tobacco, petrified saltines and the odd box of Milk Duds. Donald Trump arrived to pop the cork, a credible cross between the Swamp Thing and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, aloft on swamp gas and volatile discarded thoughts, disproven ideas and downright psychotic delusions. And he filled those emptied heads, full once again with the very psychic trash that had been dumped by a rapidly dementing public, repurposed and refitted so as to bypass any and all care or deliberated cogitation. Direct action, that is the Zombie Way. With gnashing teeth and grasping claws they chewed their way through the Mayflower Compact, the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Ten Commandments, the Geneva Convention, the Rome Statute, and the Paris Climate Agreement. Their lumbering forms took down any semblance of human decency, compassion for fellow species members, generosity for those in need, and of course that proverbial one whit of common sense.
In the end, the zombies insisted on their inalienable right to infect all of their fellow citizens with a deadly virus unleashed in the midst of the Apocalypse. They said it was the Chinese gummint. Maybe that explains why they wished to welcome its widespread viral dissemination, just as they were happy to concede all trade on the Pacific Rim to the Chinese hegemony as well. Makes sense. Or not. Sense was never the objective of the Zombie Nation and its avatars. Chaos, pure and simple. Turns out the strings were being pulled by the secretive anarchist oligarchs lurking in the wings, waiting for the zombies to finish the job of dismantling all social controls so the billionaire anarchists could swoop in and cash in their chips. They promised the zombies jobs in squalid “rescued” industries guaranteed to shorten their already miserable lives. They cranked up the asbestos mines and cyanide farms. They promised to humiliate all those pinheads who still had thoughts, still had ideas, so-called “experts.” They promised green cheese from the moon. And the zombies believed them. Then along came Pop Joe and Mamala in Peloton Spandex suits with ideas written on paper and they blew those zombies away.
There are still, as we speak, a few skirmishes on the outskirts of vote counting facilities, zombies brandishing blunderbusses and flugelhorns. But the good people of Pennsylvania have beaten them back with the stirring songs by Beyoncé Knowles and by counting. Out loud. With numbers. In order. As the zombies groan and fling their bandaged hands over their ears in a futile gesture to diminish the effects of actual language, the truth has become unavoidable, even for the walking dead: this Donald shall go. Though he may leave a faint coating of white slime on whatever surface he has touched, a sickening stench of grease-fires and burning sugar, make no mistake, he is oblooterated. And though in some corners of the thought-sucking black hole of info-dump networks still manned by zombies and oligarchy flunkies there fly false flags of thoughtlessness and nonsense, the forces of chaos and void are currently in retreat, perhaps to slime another day. But for today, the battle is won and a cork has been put in the bottle of the vile genie whose shadow frightened small children and dogs. It is okay to gather thoughts once again, good people. Fill your heads with wholesome and restorative wonderment, and smile at the inherent good fortune to once again laugh and have discourse with our fellow humans on the face of this planet. And maybe, just maybe, somebody will repair the leaky insulation on those high voltage cables. Just sayin’.
Originally appeared in Atherton Review 106, Academy Press, June 2021
