Schools, police and fire stations, ballet troupes, children's theatre groups, Pizza Hut employees who have been called in to work, bag-pipers, and old people often organize themselves into long, slow-moving lines down public roads and block traffic, tossing candy and waving at simple folks. Drooling like comatose vegetables, these simple watchers form two solid walls of human flesh on either side of these painstakingly slow rivers. They gleam like newborn babes as saliva blotches their Sunday dress shirts, watching in awe at the age-old tradition of a parade.
Oooooh! Aaaaaaah! Some local senator is going to ride down the middle of the road in a Honda Civic, forcing his children to pelt people with tiny Tootsie Rolls. The local high school band will accompany him, playing two John Phillip Sousa songs over and over again as the military recruiter zig-zags afterward, pitching a life of service to young boys gazing onward.
On September 11th, these parades hold double the meaning as our nation mourns the death of its civilians. In paralyzed, irrational terror of a potential terrorist attack in relatively unimportant cities like Milwaukee, Wisconsin, guards standby alongside the border of the parade, holding the drooling vegetables a certain few paces away as these bag-pipers and community charlatans cruise on by. T-shirts with the word "security" painted in white on black fabric designate this power beholden to the guards. These are magic T-shirts. For those without them are subject to a stern talking-to and a screeching even a shrieking owl would fly away from in mortal fear.
Unbeknownst to me, I would be caught behind one of these walls of vegetables while a parade was stomping through the middle of a festival park in Milwaukee. When parades are scheduled to happen, normally I lock myself in a dark corner with a paper bag in case I find myself hyperventilating. I bring my knees up to my chest and rock back and forth, slowly, counting imaginary sheep in my head to pass the time.
Parades are the spawn of Satan, particularly for someone like me who has a base desire of needing to navigate through large crowds quickly. Be they waddling obese gargantuans with tiny backpacks and mickey mouse ears or be they bowl-legged walking sticks with thick clouds of perfume permeating themselves, I will charge through them, in between them, and around them like a determined Han Solo in an asteroid field. The Empire will not catch me, and no jiggling mound of human flesh is too large to halt me from my final escape through a human herd.
Unfortunately, the parade is my Waterloo. The herds will freeze and form two lines, and the guards with the magic T-shirts will come out, standing sentry on the banks of the river to make sure no human moves. It is an exercise in military inspection, and those who fail will suffer a damning Fate so horrifying it is virtually unfathomable.
...or just plain unknowable, considering that no civilian has yet to figure out what sort of mystical powers that volunteer security members may or may not have. Those magic T-shirts come from a screen-printing manufacturer so secretive that only those with a high security clearance above the Atomic Bomb are in the know.
However, today I did the unthinkable. Like a scab crossing a picket line, I took that step beyond the human wall. My right foot touched the waters first. Then, my left followed suit, and before I knew it, I was breathing fresh air devoid of human feces, cheap cologne, and fatty foods. I was alive, and I was free, like a majestic eagle taking flight above a paved lot. Like the ancestors of the Native Americans for whom this festival was for, I had transformed into one of the many precious animals of the Earth, and I was on my way to transcendence of the human consciousness.
...until the security guards began to notice.
"Are they allowed to walk?" A short, middle-aged woman with red-dyed hair and a manly cut asked. Dark sunglasses hid her eyes, so I could not tell whether she was human, or merely an android.
"Noooooooooo," screeched a harpie before me. Thin, bony, demonic hands reached out toward me, filed fingernails poised to attack. This blonde woman's eyes were hidden by sunglasses as well.
Venom foamed out of her mouth as she clenched her teeth harder than Charlton Heston. There was something beyond anger within her small, fit form. There was a need for order and control, a desire to make right in the world by preventing any who would walk against the current of the parade. People like me were the reason that this world was so distraught and tearing apart - those who walk against the current to reach a new destination, not stopping for any silly man in a suit to walk by, tossing candy.
"Nooooooo," she screeched again, talons holding steady before my frame. She couldn't touch me. I'm not sure why, but I feel that I had magic too. There must have been some sort of mystical forcefield that kept her from sinking deep and clenching my heart, like Mola Ram in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
She could see Kali...
...in HELL.
Walking past, I freed myself from the human death trap that bothered me so, and I found a nicer, more open spot to enjoy a good cigar - a cigar of freedom.
