Fat, hog-jowled Chubb Rock still stood sentry at the edge of Seven Islands along the scenic, rolling, rambling James River artery of Virginia colony, and we what-upped each other like always. He was a good elf, pretty chill, which belied his role as fringe guard of the elven community, but luckily – according to Chubb – rarely did anybody venture into their territories anyways. Humans are bizarrely averse to crossing geographical barriers like a wide river, and yet we worry about arbitrary fence posts with frantic psychology.
Chief Blackberry Blossoms was in a somber mood as he greeted me. “Raven Mack, the human who lays claim to being some sort of ‘dirtgod’. I hear you have been wandering the Other Realms.”
“Yeah. Strange place.”
“You have no idea. We must go down river together, so I can show you something.”
Chief Blackberry Blossoms tended to be chill, as all elves are in my experiences. I mean, I’ve only experienced elves in my little location on this vast earth, and I guess I’ve been made aware of multiple realms just as vast within that singular vastness, so ultimately that means there may be infinite elven peoples, so it would be naïve for me to assume ALL elves are chill by nature from having met a small tribe of them. Reasoning from small part to the whole universe is one of man’s illest logics. But his somber bordering on unchill had me slightly concerned.
We took an elf canoe (these are regular human canoes that the elves steal from a place in the nearby town but then scuff the obscenely bright plastics with stones and mud into a more natural shade) and headed down river, past the freight siding I used to always scribble paint marker tags at. Chief Blackberry Blossoms wasn’t saying much. Neither was I. I’ve learned to mostly let him lead the conversation, even in normal circumstances, but especially when he was in elder motherfucker mode like now.
We went past Bremo, where they have signs saying to not eat any fish you catch or hang out in the water unprotected, due to the two power plants there, one on each side of the river. He guided the canoe to the river bank just past Bremo, near one of the power plants.
Power plants are always prison-like security zones, with high banks of earth built to hide whatever industrial tomfoolery is going on, and impenetrable fences topped with razor wire surrounding all that. I used to stop and want to take pictures, but even something as innocent as that is illegal in our post-toppled buildings terror watchlist American world. To just be standing around outside the wrong fence taking pictures is to ask to be fucked up by the system.
So as we got out the elf canoe and walked on land, I was kinda nervous about secure digital eyeballs seeing us, and coming out to enforce shit upon us. Chief Blackberry Blossoms gave no fucks though, walked through a hole in the gate that I’d never seen before, looking back to cajole me into following with elder eyeballs of authority not recognized by state but honored by me, no doubt, so I followed. We walked up the earth berm and it was a giant mucky nasty ass pond there. It stank and had all sorts of warning signs.
“This is ash pond, where they hold ash from burning coal for what you call ‘power’ or ‘energy’ but really it’s neither; it’s just electricity. Your people do this, to initiate a blazing false glory of electricity which gives you a sense of safety against the darkness. You are still afraid of the dark, even after thousands of years.”
It really stank.
“The problem with this is, in the process of doing this, toxic counter-reactions are created. That’s natural. You are not supposed to conquer the darkness, but learn to live with it. It is cyclical. It goes away. As the cycles turn, light will come back, but of course dark will too. Same with warmth, and cold. Same with black and white. Your people have trouble with this. You are stubbornly stuck to binary ways, and even when you attempt to open yourself, you only open your mind, which is an externally educated organ, trained by sensory inputs, thus a few centuries deep into binary thinking.”
“What’s the lesson for me from this?” I asked.
“There is no lesson. An open heart would help you, but you are also innately human so I don’t know how possible that is. You are likely doomed to your binary thinking, either by enforcing what you believe to be true, or realizing that the one end of the binary thinking could not possibly be true, so you violently enforce the opposite. This is the way of your people. You think the pond will de-toxify the coal ash so that you can keep hiding from the dark with justification. But it won’t. You can’t. But you probably still will.”
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