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Millennium
Jukebox
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| ALAN
SOLDOFSKY
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Published in the Greensboro Review, Number 74, Fall 2003
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| Think
we live in dangerous times? Consider the 1640s . . . Tell me when in the millennium it wasn't mostly a catastrophe. Falling towers, yes, and tribes of dark birds slowly circling. Repent Now stenciled on breastplates, graffitied on orphanages and stone bridges.
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| Fear, number one on the charts, playing in every roadhouse. You can't turn down the volume because you don't like the music. Every Roundhead on the dance floor pushing and shoving. So go on, take your sacraments; last rites are guaranteed.
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| Or you could choose another
epoch, say 1790 or 1970. Although your neck might get caught under the blade or splintered by twisted metal. The smell of burnt biosphere on the breeze. You traded in your chance to live in Nice or San Francisco for a flat in Grozny or Belfast or Zagreb, somewhere
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| night lays siege to the boulevards and a yellow fog hunches against the windowpanes. Snow scudding over Moscow apartment blocks, rain battering Chicago Southside tenements. Sand scouring the streets of East Jerusalem. Manila filled with debris. Jakarta scorched by lightning.
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| The rain that floods Tennessee sends a man into his burgundy Oldsmobile, pushes him straight through to California, a hundred miles an hour across the Bay Bridge, pursued by the Highway Patrol, tires flattened by a SWAT team, driving finally on his rims . Highway 101 closed.
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| So he douses himself with gasoline
and, after a four-and-a-half-hour standoff, is shot with pressurized foam. He said he had important things to do. Suppose you had wandered out one evening, gnats hovering above the embassies of grass,
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| the dusk the color of car sickness, the air smelling faintly wounded, and decided you too had had it. What music would you bestow upon the customers of the corner café you entered, wearing your black skullcap and your sash of bullets?
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| Or would you carry a corsage
of fuses onto the bus, counting backwards to yourself, ears plugged into your Walkman, and watch the dust drifting through the fiery sunlight as you grasp the sides of your seat, a prayer book stuffed like a ticket in your back pocket? |
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