The last run

A thousand miles out going nowhere on a hot road pushing eighty, yeah, just sky thunder rolling, figuring to leave everything behind, and trying to make nowhere. The day, the ride, makes a noise like endless music.
I ploughed a bad dream for too many years, took too much, almost lost it a couple of times, almost forgot where I wanted to be.

Now I am here where I am, and it isn’t anywhere and that’s where I want to be. As the days roll into weeks the bad fades to the back of my mind, under this wide sky, except I keep waking up in the night suddenly and crying out, as if I was still back there, still living the machines, until I push it back out of my thoughts, so I just lie there, not able to get back to sleep, listening to the crickets, thinking they’ll probably outlive me.

So here I am, drenched in sweat, waiting for the morning to come, so I can push some more miles under my belt, to let the drone of the bike’s engine and the wind drown out the thoughts, man, they are not cool, let me tell you, they just are not cool. Maybe if I talk about them it might help me get it off my chest:
When people started dropping like flies in the street, in their cars, and in their homes, hell, a regular plague of death; millions of people all over the world, just dropping down dead. That blew everyone’s mind. Then the rioting started, and the suicides. The world just went crazy, and the heat. It’s so hot, so hard to breathe, you can’t go anywhere but you’re drenched in sweat.
Oh they had plenty of scientific explanations at first to try to keep the population from really freaking out. But I found out what really happened, yeah, I found out all right, and now I’m riding one last run and I don’t know how much time I’ve got left. You see, people, left alone to live their lives as they want to, just want to be happy, to love, raise a few kids, have somewhere nice to live. People know what they want and it’s not a lot. There’s this great big beautiful world and most of us on it just want to get it on. But I found out who it is that’s screwing it all up. I went into their machine, their top secret bloody machine.

I’m pretty good with computers, some said I was the best they’d ever seen, what I couldn’t do wasn’t worth knowing. Ah, it was just a job. My real passion was getting out on the road with my Harley and just rolling. Twenty years I’ve been riding, twenty years of bliss. But I had to work, so I made my money from setting up computer-systems, mainframe, the big ones, hell, you name it and I’ve been there. So they called me in to fix the big one, the one that was linked up all around the world: all the world’s governments, police, army, all joined together. Something had gone wrong. But I couldn’t get in, not at first. Something was stopping access. I was stumped, no way in and no way to turn it off, until they wired me up, experimental, a way of getting in with my mind. Well that got me in, got me in real good, to where I didn’t want to be, where I shouldn’t have got to. I found out.
My job was to fix what was wrong, but it was too late for that, they’d let it go on too long.
The sun comes now with its heat and on I go far and fast as I can.
This road’s hot, nothing growing, and desert. Not much time left. The Harley keeps on going. Somebody put one together here damn well; but I should have taken off years ago.
I just found out is all, couldn’t change anything, they’d gone too far: those with the money wanting to make more and those with the power, wanting more control. Yeah, complete brain control.
In the sixties, people found freedom, broke out of the control, and made it. But those in power saw what was happening and it frightened them. They could see the end of their system and control, so they all got together and come up with CAMC: computer assisted mind control, trouble is it got out of control.

You see, people go one of two ways, either they follow their hearts, or they follow their mind, leave them be and the heart wins out, but start messing about with the electrical waves of people’s brains and you’ve got chaos. That’s what they did: messed about with planetary consciousness. Warped peoples desires from what they really wanted. In the end it went too far, tipped the subconscious over the edge, no turning back. Nobody knew what they really wanted any more. Just grab anything they could get their hands on. Buy more and more. Some got richer and richer. Most everyone else just got poorer. Baser instincts came out. No more love. No more caring.
The sensitive ones just fell in the street with brain overload. Some of us managed to fight it, managed to drown the waves out, but it was too late to change anything, the people went crazy, wanted too much. Took too much out of the planet and messed the place right up. Now all that’s left is a few weeks maybe before the whole thing burns up, ozone, chemical, and no more trees, polluted, everything dying, gone.
I switched the machine off from the inside, but it had gone too far to stop. I got out of the machine and ran for it, decided to go for one last run to the ocean, but man it’s hot on this lonely road to nowhere.