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CrazySugarFreakBoy!
Sun Apr 16, 2006 at 10:26:41 pm EDT
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Time Capsule of a Temporary Autonomous Zone (Tie-In to Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #268: The Grave Mistake)
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Time Capsule of a Temporary Autonomous Zone (Tie-In to Untold Tales of the Lair Legion #268: The Grave Mistake)

From: Dreamcatcher Kokopelli Foxglove, a.k.a. CrazySugarFreakBoy! (dkfoxglove@pantheon.odyssey.ord)

To: “Amazing Super-Friends” e-mail list (Duncan, Henry; Francis, Simon; Geoffries, Penelope; Warren, Ethan; Zola, Lazlo)

Subject: Time Capsule of a Temporary Autonomous Zone

And this is how human history is going to break down. We built up from tribes, and after all the eras of villages and cities and states and nations and religions and races, we’ve wound up as tribes again, as all of our previous political and philosophical and economic and ethnic distinctions have shifted and evolved and cross-pollinated so totally that they’ve lost any real meaning to anyone who bothers to look beyond the labels, so all we’re left with are the concentric circles of friends we’ve chosen and families we’ve been born into, the interlinked kinships of the blood and the experiences we share in common. What this situation has recreated is the paradox of the pantheons, just like the Super Friends we grew up watching and wanting to be, because these new tribes are walking contradictions, every one a corps of iconoclasts, which somehow overcomes and even seems to draw strength and solidarity from the weaknesses inherent in fundamental conflicts of characteristics that should be irreconcilable by definition. And what this means is that every one of these new tribes is literally a miracle, for however long it might last.

I don’t even know what to call the new tribe that’s being born on the Spokane Indian Reservation, but I know a few things about the old tribe that’s giving birth to it. Depending on which of the more recent guestimates you’re listening to, the Spokane Tribe of Indians currently boasts anywhere between a thousand to a couple of thousand official members, of whom only about two-thirds to three-quarters actually lived full-time on the reservation lands before Special Resolution 1066 was first proposed in Congress. In the months since then, not only have a lot of old tribal members come back home, but they’ve also been joined by any number of non-Native supers and costumed humans seeking asylum, in addition to a surprisingly sizable contingent of civilians who personally have nothing to lose, but who have nonetheless cast in their lot with us, to lodge their conscientious objections to the government’s policies. According to my dad, Louis Laughing Fox, who’s the Sheriff of the Spokane Tribal Police, the total headcount of post-SR1066 immigrants probably adds up to more than double the original population in residence on the Rez, which technically makes the Spokane Indians a minority on their own lands now, a fact that seems to amuse and irritate him in equal measure. Not that we’re actually lacking for land, since even after you subtract the 90 percent of the reservation that’s still held in trust by the federal government, and then set aside all of the areas where adverse elements and hostile wildlife tend to make the terrain less than habitable, you’ve still got something close to 15,000 acres of open ground to play around with.

When you’re conducting a combination of a pow-wow and a potlatch, the trickiest balancing act isn’t in how you handle the parceling out of camp sites for the tents and RVs and all their accompanying vehicles, but in how you manage and expand the administration and infrastructure that’s needed to serve all these huddled masses, without trashing the natural environment or getting bogged down in bullshit bureaucracy. It’s not a set of circumstances that would make most guys glad to have two of their ex-girlfriends along for the ride, but most guys haven’t been lucky enough to score a couple of ex-girlfriends as smart or as strong as either Pelopia or Anna. You might remember Anna Kensington from our Dungeons & Dragons campaigns a couple of years ago … beautiful black girl with long braided hair, always role-played a Lawful Good alignment? Well, when she became the boss of Odyssey Opportunities’ Icarus Innovations, not only did she acquire acting operational control over what was once Ezra Emrys Wright’s Hammers of Hephaestus, Inc., but she also inherited what was, by all accounts, his only remaining “XOOM (eXOskeleton Operated Mentally) Xoot,” which she reverse-engineered to rebuild and become the new Blacksmith. She and my dad are both techies with an old-school fondness for tinkering, so they’ve had fun talking about how to install non-invasive short-term utility service augmentations, to take care of everything from potable water, sewage and waste disposal to electricity, radio, phone and cable communications, and even medical care, since the health clinic in Wellpinit is a doublewide trailer staffed by three doctors, four nurses and a dentist.

For the Priestess Pelopia, the Disciple of Logos and the daughter of the (supposedly) departed Word of Order, adapting to this brave new paradigm has been much more of an arduous adjustment. I mean, don’t get me wrong, she’s a king-hell organizer who could transform even the most stoner-saturated college dorm into the frighteningly brilliant efficiency of the Fourth Reich, but I suspect she’s met her match in her efforts to encourage “Indian time” to sync up with her internal atomic clock. Still, even my dad isn’t too proud to recognize the benefits of hearing from a voice of anal-retentive reason on occasion, to help keep our tribal council of roughly half a dozen elders on track, which is why he’s been doing his best to translate and pass on her better suggestions to them. What’s so surreal about this scene is that everyone involved in these filtered discussions speaks perfectly conversational English, but from a cultural standpoint, neither Pelopia nor the tribal elders can even begin to comprehend each other’s languages, so my dad has to be there to act as their intermediary, usually by standing directly between them, to repeat and rephrase all of their statements, so that each side can kind of understand what the other means, relative to their own perspectives.

I wish I could say that Pelopia was getting along a bit better with my mom, but it looks like the newfound, albeit glacially paced, détente in their ongoing Cold War is about as good as it’s going to get between them for the foreseeable future. Between escaping from an attempted Obedience Branding at the hands of the Men in Black, with my baby brother (Oliver Hastings, named after my aunt Olivia) in tow, and discovering that she’d suddenly become a grandma in her brief absence from the Lair Legion Mansion, I guess my mom had reached her limit, as far as any tolerance for further drama was concerned, so she just asked Pelopia straight out, what would you do if someone tried to hurt your baby? I still can’t accept that Pelopia is the bad seed that everyone else seems to see her as, but I’m also honest enough to own up to the evidence that she’s not exactly emotionally demonstrative, either, so it surprised me when, after a moment of silence, she admitted that she would want to kill anyone who harmed her child, even though her own belief systems and standards of behavior would deem such a reaction to be “irrational” and “potentially counterproductive.” It surprised me even more when my mom’s only response was to nod her head and drop the subject with a simple “Okay.” I don’t think they like each other any more now than they did before, but I haven’t heard them argue since.

One of the most intimidating signs that it might be time for you to start acting like an adult is when you can finally tell how tough it is for your parents to cope with the world. In spite of how tired they both are, my dad still has to preserve some semblance of law and peace, even within the boundaries of what the anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey might describe as one of his “pirate utopias,” while my mom feels obligated to put on her public face as Meggan Foxxx, Action Figure, every time she clocks in a DJ shift, either in the broadcasting booth of the reservation’s own radio station or at remote locations outside the studio with an on-site transmitter, to meet and greet her adoring audiences with sunny smiles, lighthearted laughter and Ollie the tiny toddler slung across her hip.

What my mom tries like hell to hide, from me and everyone else, is how wrecked she is, after the nights she does nursemaid duties for Wendy. My long-lost kid sister, Gwendolyn Leslie (alias Cinnamon Raven) is not only the aspiring supervillain PsychoAcidPervGirl!, but she’s also become one of the latest victims of the Obedience Brand. Just like her big brother, she’s an Agent of Chaos, chosen by cosmic-level forces and empowered by a Silly Suit spun out of pure Impossibilitium, which is why every fiber of her being is fighting against the external control and artificial Order that the Brand is attempting to impose on both her psychic and physical selves, scarring her previously pristine pixie face and fucking even further with the well-scrambled contents of her skull. Sydney St. Sylvain, the Fabulous Fashion Fairy, stops by the Rez and checks in on Wendy whenever she can, casting handfuls of Glamour Glitter over her and feeding her extracts of Neverland Nectar, to comfort her and ease her through the worst of her symptoms, since not even a scientific genius like Dr. Leonard Day-Vincent, Sydney’s ex-husband and the retired superhero formerly known as the Renaissance Man, can come up with a cure for Wendy’s condition yet. Mostly, though, me and the folks are the only ones with enough energy and willpower to endure Wendy for any length of time. Sometimes I’ll duck my head in the lodge where she sleeps, and the scene will play out like something straight out of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Other times, I’ll walk in on her and my mom hugging each other tight and crying their eyes out together, wailing anguished apologies to one another.

And now, I’m a parent myself, which is … well, deeply surreal, but more importantly, it’s probably another hint that my dumb ass needs to stop fucking up and start growing up. My daughter is Iris Paintbrush Sunrise, which technically makes her the world’s first real-life character to be named by my girlfriend, Groovy Gecko-Gal creator April Alice Apple, although April credited Pelopia with contributing constructively to her choice. Iris has tiny fingers, a fat tummy and an upturned button nose that my mom claims looks exactly like mine did, back when I was that age. Her eyes are always wide with curiosity, her mouth is always open in surprise, and even as she squirms in my arms and snuggles against my chest while I type this, I’m still not quite sure she knows entirely what to make of me just yet, which kind of makes two of us, but what I already know in my heart is that she’s perfect … I love everything about her, and I’d do anything to make sure she has nothing but the best in her life, which is why I finally sat down and had a long-overdue chat with my mom and dad, and with girlfriends old and new, all at once.

There’s no way I can do this job alone, not in the least because I have absolutely no clue what it is that I’m meant to be doing, and my daughter deserves better than to have me winging this gig on my own, as if it was no big deal. She needs her dad to raise her, but she also needs to be raised by her grandma Meg, her grandpa Louis, her aunt Wendy, her uncle Ollie, and her stepmother and mother both. I didn’t have my dad around when I was a kid, and I don’t blame that on my dad or my mom, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to deprive my own kid of her mom. Between the Globetrotting Gangbusters, whom I trusted and trained to be a team, until they were Branded to turn them against me and against their own free wills, and Gideon Book, who always spoke out and stuck up for me, even though he was never under any obligation to do so, I’ve already lost and let down too many people who were counting on me. I still play with all the same toys and games that I did as a kid, I still recall even the most minor details of everything I’ve seen, heard and read, and I still keep the memory of Isabel Shapiro alive inside of me, because I’m a stubborn son-of-a-bitch and I’ve never voluntarily let go of anything in my life.

I’m the guy who walks a million miles to find himself still standing dead center in the middle of the crossroads where he started from, because I carry my own crossroads around me and inside of me, like a fixed halo radiating out from my head. I can go just about anywhere and do just about anything, but I can never really belong exclusively to any one preexisting place or time or group of people, which is, I guess, why I’ve worked so hard to gather my own new tribe of fellow cast-off and cast-adrift travelers, with whom I’ve connected as kindred spirits, out of the rejects and rebels and remnants I’ve collected from the succession of old tribes I’ve come across, like a Giffen-and-DeMatteis Justice League lineup of hopeless also-rans and habitual non-joiners launching the ultimate jihad, a true, universal Revenge of the Nerds.

I don’t know how long this “Temporary Autonomous Zone” (to steal another term from the essays of Hakim Bey) or the expanding new tribe at the Spokane Indian Reservation are going to last. By definition, I know they won’t last forever, but then again, nothing ever does, and what matters is whether they last long enough to see these people through to the other side of this thing, whatever that turns out to be. I honestly don’t know if I’m going to make it through myself. I don’t even know how I’m going to work out shared custody of Iris with Pelopia, if we all manage to survive this storm. In the end, aside from inviting you all to join our festivities, which are shaping up to be a surprisingly upbeat Burning Man affair, all I can offer you, gang, is this e-mail time capsule of our Temporary Autonomous Zone, and my genuine assurances that I’ve always been grateful to have you as members of my misfit tribe.

My name is Dreamcatcher Kokopelli Foxglove and I’m the Agent of Chaos, CrazySugarFreakBoy!

Thanks for spending all these years playing Dungeons & Dragons with me, and letting me learn a little something about courage.


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